Subject: Re: mailing lists - coping

From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Oct 1997 11:35:54 +0200

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AV> On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Andrew Vardy wrote:
AV> I want to know how to cope with mailing lists.  I don't think this
AV> has ever been mentioned before.  Never seen anyone discuss it.

Yes it has. It falls under the "how do I filter x into y" category.

AV> How does one cope with a flurry of messages from a very many
AV> high-volume mailing lists?  How to keep it all remotely
AV> manageable, and be able to locate important messages?  Pine does
AV> not let you subdivide mail that comes in according to lists.  All
AV> mail goes simply in one INBOX.

Two problems here:

1. filtering
   consult Nancy McGough's fabulous filtering faq

2. scoring/killing
   pine does not do scoring. It doesn't do killfiling, either. Both
   sucks. If you have to deal with many hv-lists (and newsgroups,
   too), you might be interested in trying Gnus for XEmacs. You will
   find adaptive scoring very interesting since it will effectively do 
   away with unwanted (i.e. you are not interested in them) mails and
   news. It will also pre-sort messages for you according to the score 
   the thread/author... has, i.e. most important ones come first.

AV> Now saving mail with 's' command, I press that, and then can type
AV> some folder.  I can never there after be able to locate it.  It
AV> will put it in a folder.  Kind of hard going from folder to folder.

True. Especially since you cannot see how many messages there are in a 
folder or if new mail has arrived in one. Here's what I see in Gnus:

[ Mailing Lists -- 8:22 ]
*     0: subscription                                       1 
      1: pine                                               2 
      1: Unsort                                             5 
[ News -- 1:3363 ]
      2: comp.mail.pine                                     2 localhost

All information I need available: how many, where, dormant articles
etc. BTW, the folders have different score levels, too, so that I can
zoom in on, say, level 1 where I only keep private mail.

AV> Anyway, once I do this, my quota gets ever narrower.  I have a
AV> very small allowable file size quota.  The INBOX interestingly
AV> does not take up quota space.  But all other folders add up the
AV> total file size space towards the quota.  That quota draws up
AV> quick!

Bribe your sysadmin.

AV> I don't really have any interesting method of systematically
AV> moving messages saving them filing them away, downloading, to do
AV> this quickly enough so the INBOX would stay under 50-100 messages.
AV> And if I start simply deleting a lot, and frequently, then I will
AV> definitely be deleting messages that are important/relevant to me,
AV> and would at least like to refer to sometime.  I need advice.  Is
AV> there any?

Yes, scoring, killing and expiring. Setting up a cron job that puts your
stuff on disks. Mailing your mail-folders home to you. Anything... Even a
procmail recipe that will file your most important mails to a special
folder and prunes everything else... Gotta look that up in the respective
docs.

AV> Or is Pine too old to manage this type of mail difficulty/organization?

IMAO, it is. You can kluge your way around its limitations, but if I
were in a situation like yours, I'd go for the appropriate tool. That'd
be Gnus.

YMMV,
Robin

-- 
Robin S. Socha M.A.
"Linux poses a real challenge for those with a taste for late-night
hacking (and/or conversations with God)."               (Matt Welsh)

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From: Andrew Vardy <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 09:02:35 -0330 (NST)

> Yes it has. It falls under the "how do I filter x into y" category.

Maybe I was also including the idea of arranging real old mail, may wish
to refer to sometime in the future, or use as boilerplate potential text
material to add in future mail.  But month old or more, so you have to
download it. 

Do you people just download folders every month?  Or download bundles of
(E)xported mail?

>    consult Nancy McGough's fabulous filtering faq

Ok.  Gone through steps: 1-7.  Now, the test did not work.  No file
appears in my 'mail' directory.  And no file appears in my '.procmail'
directory.  I tested a whole bunch of times.  And a bunch of mail, all
mail I sent to myself, appeared all in my INBOX.

I don't think there's any typos I made in any files I created.

Help!  ;-)

>    too), you might be interested in trying Gnus for XEmacs. You will

Will that work for OSF1?

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From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: 27 Oct 1997 13:49:45 +0100

>> "AV" == Andrew Vardy <[email-masked]> writes:
AV> On 21 Oct 1997, Robin S. Socha wrote:
AV> On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Andrew Vardy wrote: 
[...]
AV> Do you people just download folders every month?  Or download
AV> bundles of (E)xported mail?

Soup packages, actually. But that's of no importance here :-)

[...]
>> 1. filtering 
AV> Ok.  Gone through steps: 1-7.  Now, the test did not work.  No
AV> file appears in my 'mail' directory.  And no file appears in my
AV> '.procmail' directory.  I tested a whole bunch of times.  And a
AV> bunch of mail, all mail I sent to myself, appeared all in my
AV> INBOX.  I don't think there's any typos I made in any files I
AV> created. Help!  ;-)

Wrong list here, but I get the impression you'd rather read the docs
again. Era Eriksson and some other people from the procmail list have
put together very nice tutorials/how-to's and stuff. Do a websearch
for those. Also, try to grab a tool called dotfile-generator. It might 
be helpful in the beginning. And don't forget to put procmail on
verbose and check the logs.

>> 2. scoring/killing
AV> Will that work for OSF1?

Sure. What's OSF1? A tv channel?

Later,
Robin

-- 
Robin S. Socha M.A.
What's this script do?
unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep