Re: debian-user and mail tools

[Jason Rennie <jrennie@csail.mit.edu>]

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 04:42:33PM +0100, Bob Alexander wrote:
> Thunderbird does a decent (but not wonderful) job of filtering spam.

I use bogofilter (via procmail) to do spam filtering.  "Out of the
box," bogofilter works very well.  Tuned, it's extremely effective.  My FP
(regular mail labeled as spam) & FN (spam labeled as regular mail)
rates are less than 1%.

I have my mail delivered locally.  It might be tricky to use
bogofilter in conjunction with IMAP (I don't know, never tried).

Here's my procmail line for bogofilter ("/." suffix indicates MH-style mailbox)

:0BH
* ? /usr/bin/bogofilter
spam/.

> What I do not like about TB is the relative clumsy interface to build 
> filters to weed out topics I am not interested into or "plunking" rude 
> or otherwise irritant people.

Eliminating certain people is pretty trivial with procmail.  Here's a
recipe to eliminate messages from me:

:0
* ^From:.*jrennie@.*mit.edu
/dev/null

> Does any of you offer some good suggestion on a client which will make 
> my life easier with filtering, killing/ignoring whole threads and any 
> other goodies experience shows you to be important on such an high 
> volume list ?

Like someone else mentioned, ctrl-d in mutt kills a whole thread.
Another mutt nicety: "/" (forward slash) displays only messages with
headers that match a search string (great for searching subject or
from headers).

Jason