Re: Blacklisting threads

[Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org>]

I've been working on a system to make boring threads less conspicuous.
It's not finished, and when it is I'll do a proper writeup, but what
I currently do is

 • make sure I have 256 colour terminals working (correct $TERM
   variable, uxterm, correct arguments to tmux, etc.)

 • I use the default grey text colour on a black background for
   normal text. This is "color8" in the normal 16-colour terminal
   palette, which happens to coincide with "color254" in the 256
   colour palette. FWIW, colours 232 through to 255 are a greyscale
   ramp.

 • I've chosen a lower-contrast colour to mark people who I do not
   enjoy reading: color237. When I want to add someone to that
   collection, I make a note of either their email address or
   (better) a uniquely-identifying portion of their message-ids. The
   latter is less reliable since so many people use gmail or gmane,
   but if you wanted to do this to me for example, "redmars.org" will
   catch all my recent and future emails.

 • I then add a line like the following to one of my mutt config files

> folder-hook debian-user 'color index color237 default "~h redmars.org"

^ works for people you can identify using message-ids, and works for
replies to their messages too (since that gets propagated into other
people's "references:" headers). Sadly it won't catch replies to such
people if you are trying to match on their email address. For a few
limited such cases,

> folder-hook debian-user 'color index color237 default "~B Dowland"

^ Can do the trick (if you have a unique enough portion of someone's
name, as it's often included in an attribution line above quotes, or
signatures).  However matching against the body is more computationally
expensive if your list folder is quite large.

Then I can skip over the lower-contrast regions of my list view with
relative ease. I also make a habit of deleting entire threads if they
bore me.

My aim is to use 16-bit terminal colours (currently only reliably
supported in Konsole) and a larger range of greyscales, to use a
separate crm114 configuration to score mailing list mail on an
"interestingness" basis (I use crm114 for spam filtering but do not want
to re-use those buckets for two purposes) and to auto-colour based on
the corresponding "spam" score. A writeup when it's ready.


-- 
Jonathan Dowland