Re: Mailing Subject Format Inquiry

[Peter Wright]

Steven,

On 15/02 12:41:58, Steven White wrote:
> On 2/15/10 12:06 PM, Colin Campbell wrote:
>> Steven White wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Just an inquiry, but is there any specific reason why the mailing
>>> list doesn't have a prepended subject like [lilypond-user]?
[ ... ]
>> At home, I use Thunderbird, so I've created a couple of filters
>> which read the To/cc headers and move the messages to folders, oone
>> for lilypond-user and another for lilypond-devel.
>
> I was mostly just wondering if anyone had opinions on it.  I have
> about 8 mailing list archived on this address and they all follow
> the same format. So most of my filters are off the subject line
> instead of the rest of the header. Has the added benefit of making
> it easier to eye ball the origin of an email when looking at a mixed set.

I've noticed this for a while with lilypond-user - like you, it's one
of the minority of the mailing lists I'm on that *doesn't* use the
subject prefix convention, so it's much less easy to do an
eyeball-filter/scan as you describe.

Colin's suggestion of filter rules to put things in different folders
is fine, but that approach just doesn't work too well for me. I prefer
to read (or at least scan) everything as it comes in - if the email's
automatically sent off to another folder, I find I can just forget to
check that folder.

Anyway, as I read your email I thought "He could just use procmail to
prepend the mailing list name to the subject!" - then I realised I
could do that too. :-)

The relevant part of my new ~/.procmailrc is attached as
procmailrc-subject-hack.txt (partially snarfed from
http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html#subjid ). It seems to
work quite well for me so far - the only minor qualifier is that you'd
need to remember to *remove* the auto-added Subject prefix when
replying to the list.

It looks like Thunderbird mail filter rules are (deliberately?)
limited and can't do anything quite that tricky[0] - so you'd need to
work out how to use something like procmail (or maildrop) to use this
approach. And that can be a pain to set up if you normally access your
email over IMAP.

Oh well, it's up to you if you want to try it. But thanks for giving
me the idea. :-)


Pete.

[0] You *could* however use the Thunderbird "tagging" feature as a
    colour-based alternative to the Subject prefix marker:

    Right-click on a lilypond-user message
      -> Tag -> New Tag -> "lilypond" [set colour]

    Then Tools -> Message Filters -> New
      -> Filter Name: "Lilypond mailing list"
      -> Match any: To or Cc contains "address@hidden"
      -> Perform  : Tag Message  [lilypond-user]

    Then Tools -> Run Filters on Folder
-- 
"Debugging or reading Unlambda programs is just about impossible."
    -- Unlambda: Your Functional Programming Language Nightmares Come True

procmailrc-subject-hack.txt
Description: Text document