Subject: Re: Filtering w/ PINE

From: [email-masked] (Stefan Chakerian)
Date: 3 Aug 1994 17:30:00 -0600

David L Miller  <[email-masked]> wrote:
>No, Pine does not do delivery filtering.  You need an external filter 
>program to accomplish that.  Someone at netcom should be able to tell you 
>what is available there and how to use it...
>> I'm using Pine to read my E-mail and would like to filter certain 
>> incoming messages to a particular folder other than IN-COMING.

Check for the existence of "filter" or "procmail"  Filter is easy to
use, but procmail is pretty powerful.

				stef
-- 
Stefan Chakerian		Good, fast, cheap.  Pick two.
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Bryce Wilcox)
Date: 5 Aug 1994 00:30:32 GMT

>use, but procmail is pretty powerful.

*FILTER* is easy to use?  Cosmos I hate UNIX and this whole ugly little
command-line, shell script world.  Ugly ugly ugly.  As soon as my stupid
machine GETS "filter" set up *then* I have the pleasure of wasting *another*
few hours of my life trying to figure out how to do the simple task of
splitting my incoming mail into 2 folders by Subject line.  How fucking 
difficult can that be?  Why the hell doesn't Pine or Elm or something just
have a key you hit and it asks you "What subject line?" and "Into which
folder?" and have fucking DONE with it?

I long for the day when this whole paradigm of user interface is a detestable
memory.

Bryce
[email-masked]

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From: Mike Stok <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 06:16:39 -0400 (EDT)

> folder?" and have fucking DONE with it?

What astounding eloquence & articulation.

The problem with most tools on most computer systems is that the more 
flexible they are the more detail is required to specify how you want 
them to behave.

To take a simple example from my .procmailrc (the file procmail uses to 
determine what to do with my incoming mail:

MAILDIR=$HOME/mail

#
# AMANDA mail reports
#

:0:
*^Subject:.*AMANDA MAIL REPORT FOR
amanda-mail

This could have been invented by changing a few of the words in the 
manual page / cookbook that came with procmail and *not* required an 
understanding of the regular expression notation.

Tells procmail to put mail with a Subject line containing AMANDA MAIL 
REPORT FOR in a folder called amanda-mail.

The reason Pine and Elm don't shuffle mail between mail boxes when it 
arrives is because their function is *not* delivery of inbound mail, a 
progran which was responsible for sending & receiving mail would be even 
more complex.  I suppose that it would be possible to have features that 
automatically shuffled mail aboutr thwn pine started up and every time 
new mail arrived, but that seems like a lot of work, and even if it were 
to be implemented as you suggest people would eventually ask for features 
like pattern matching and case insensitivity and the .pinerc would start 
looking like a little language for describing regular expressions again.  

One possible way round this would be to have the user shuffle mail 
manually for a bit and stick a simple bit of neural network code into 
pine so that once it recognised some patterns of use it could 
automatically start prompting the user...  There's probably time to get 
that in to 3.90 still ;-)

> I long for the day when this whole paradigm of user interface is a detestable

If you abandon using computers today then you're in luck ;-) The paradigm
of "user interface" is pretty useful to people trying to use computers. 
Even if someone develops a really neat buzzword-laden GUI driven object
oriented interface there'll be someone who says "Just how many *******
buttons do I have to press to specify..." 

Rant off.

Thanks to the Pine Team for pine which is still fairly simple despite the 
number of features grafted on to it.

Mike

-- 
The "usual disclaimers" apply.    | Meiko
Mike Stok                         | 130C Baker Ave. Ext
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