Hey, procmail gurus

[Bill Freeman]

Steven W. Orr writes:
 > On Tuesday, Mar 27th 2007 at 12:00 -0500, quoth Bill Freeman:
 > 
 > =>I have found that, usually, when a list posting has generated 10 or 20
 > =>replies, I'm no longer interested in the follow-ups.  Can procmail count
 > =>messages with the smae subject line (preferably ignore the depth of
 > =>"Re:") and discard or divert additional messages once the count has
 > =>been reached?  (There would be obvious refinements, such as being
 > =>able to declare a thread interesting, letting it evade the count, but
 > =>that's for later.)
 > =>
 > =>Or maybe I should do a python script.
 > 
 > I don't think pythin is going to help you. What you need is memory. 

Ah, well, that's exactly where python would help.  It has a number of
persistence solutions.  I guess part of my original motivation for the
question was as to whether procmail had such persistent memory.

 > In procmail (or whatever marvel of nature you come up) you're going to 
 > need  to create a file (with locking of course) which contains your state 
 > (in this case a count). Whenever you get a message to this list on the 
 > same subject, just increment the counter. Of course the counter would have 
 > to be the value of a hash so you can have multiple subjects that you can 
 > want to be tired of. And, the people who would try to help you would never 
 > be heard since the really good help probably wouldn't come until after 10 
 > or 20 replies, and by then you would have lost interest. ;-)

And that's where refinements come in.  Counts could be automatically
extended if I post on the topic, more if I'm the original poster.
Counts might be kept by poster, as well or instead, and certain well
respected posters might get boosted count thresholds, etc.  Since I'd
be doing it in python anyway, it's easy to add a tool to manually
boost thresholds for a favored topic.  Diverting, rather than
discarding, messages beyond threshold means that manual threshold
boosting could be done even after clipping had started.  Then there
needs to be a feature that discards diverted stuff that's really old.

Bill