Hey, procmail gurus

[Bill Freeman]

Ben Scott writes:
 > On 3/27/07, Bill Freeman <f at ke1g.mv.com> wrote:
 > > I have found that, usually, when a list posting has generated 10 or 20
 > > replies, I'm no longer interested in the follow-ups.
 > > ... being able to declare a thread interesting ...
 > 
 >   What mail reader do you use?

VM (view mail) in emacs, reading a local mailbox that has been filled
by using fetchmail to pull from various accounts..

 >  It might be easier/better to address
 > things from that standpoint.  For example, some readers allow you to
 > do something called "thread kill", which lets you, with a single
 > keystroke, say you don't want to see a given thread anymore.
 > Depending on the implementation, this might be a "soft kill", which
 > simply marks future new mail in the thread as "read", or might be a
 > "hard kill", which deletes it.

It deletes it.  Sadly, it also deletes things already read on the
topic.  Often there are a few messages in the initial group that
are worth saving, since the come from before the "me to" and flame
war segments.  If I had the ambition to save them off into a folder
first they would be safe, but I don't.  And it only kills what's
in my "INBOX", not remembering to kill stuff after the next pull.

 >   Otherwise, what you describe probably could be done with procmail
 > (just about anything do with mail can be done with procmail), but it
 > might need a little shell script hackery to go with it.

As discussed elsewhere, unless procmail can remember the stats for
future killing, I think that I'm on my own.  Incomming mail for me
isn't such a heavy burden that the starting Python interpreter for
each message would be noticably slow.  There are all sorts of modules
for parsing mail headers and Mime, so it shouldn't be too tough to
write what I want.  If I find the ambition, I'll let you know.

Bill