[Ilugc] Any takers for this project?
- From: girishvenkatachalam@xxxxxxxxx (Girish Venkatachalam)
- Date: Mon Oct 27 08:34:57 2008
On 22:04:34 Oct 26, Raman.P wrote:
Dear luggies (especially students)
I have a project idea as follows:
The software should watch my mails from a mailing list.
If a thread which doesn't contain
Anything relavant to FOSS like linux,open source, ilug, software freedom
etc., ( I can give a list of key words to look for)
Actually you should be looking for the e-mail ID of the person who does
the posting. That is the way procmail scoring is designed and usually
that is the way the real world works as well.
Smart people and mature individuals almost always say very useful
things. People hardly ever change and you will certainly have certain
individual's opinions that are either 180 degrees volte face with yours
(like mine for instance) and you could straight away trash them.
procmail gives you good granularity. It is a project started with good
intentions and probably a comprehensive solution space but the
implementation is too complex and spectacularly hard to use.
But this can be done. Whatever you want and more can be done with
procmail.
and if thread length exceeds 5 [ a user tunable number]
You can specify the mailsize with procmail. For threads to be detected I
think you will have to interrogate mutt. Not sure about this.
then it temporarily unsubscribes me from list.
As someone suggested this is an unwise option. I would rather that I
simply trash mails to /dev/null or something. Nowadays broadband
bandwidth is also cheap and you aren't really hurting your finances if
you are using a sensible ISP with an even more sensible Internet plan.
It should watch the list( by looking at archives), ensure that
the no activity is there in the thread atleast for 2 (again tunable) days
and reactivate the subscription.
Unnecessary I think at least IMHO. What you need is good mails or the
mails that interest you. No need to scan archives since they are old and
no need to make things more complicated.
Preferred language - perl - as that is what I know.
There is no doubt about the strength of perl when it comes to solving
any problem and I am a very big fan of perl myself but procmail is
written in C and you only have to setup procmail rules which is a
question of common sense and UNIX familiarity rather than programming.
Now I think there are alternatives to procmail possibly written in perl
that you could use. You can search in
http://search.cpan.org
in which case it would be a fun perl project that would interest
students.
I highly doubt if this would be of general use to individuals.
Everyone needs their own procmail rules. I have mine.
I also developed my own custom mailing system that fetches mails every
two hours, my laundry list of procmail rules and their corresponding
folders(one per mailing list) and so on.
It was very very hard to do this but now that I have this it helps me
keep myself abreast of what is happening in all the 30 odd mailing lists
I am subscribed to.
At the same time nowadays or times when I am really busy or when I lack
the hardware resources to pursue a particular list or lists I simply
select all and delete in mutt for the select lists I wish to ignore.
And the thread option in mutt is very useful. Sometimes sensible people
go off on a tangent and talk non technical things that do not interest
me. So I simply press 'D' in mutt which deletes all mails in that
thread.
I don't find myself doing this often though.
Another very useful trick I do is saving interesting mails in plaintext
format so I can use for programming. I do that with jQuery all the time.
I do a 'vim -' after piping the mail in mutt with '|' command.
Then I delete the headers and do a :wq to the desired file name.
There you go. A long epistle from me.
-Girish
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