I have a lot of digest mail to process --many mailing lists, many
different types of digests &c. I usually use one
of 2 choices to burst the digests into their component messages
& store them in my mh folders:
either something like
a)formail +1 -ds rcvstore +folder
or
b)formail +1 -ds procmail
& then rely on rules in .procmailrc for the handling messages recursively.
c)Looking now I see I also do some 2 step rules where I rcvstore the
whole digest & then use mh's burst in that folder.
Here are things I find I want to do with digests
Sort! Sort by subject mostly
Clean up wayward subject lines
filter (people, subjects; sometimes filter for, sometimes killfile-like)
remove old messages
Some of these things are perhaps best done with cron jobs (the age filter).
Perhaps sorting is better done with cron. But I'd rather sorting was done
after the digest was unloaded, not at some random time during the day. What
is a usable way of doing this? Suppose the a) & b) rules had "c"
flags & then a 2nd rule followed it to call mh's sortm in the appropriate
folder?
[What I have done, for recursively-processed digests, b), is put this
kind of combination after the rcvstore rule for the individual messages.
But this is a bad thing -- if the digest has a huge number of messages
the cpu is pinned processing messages, waiting on lock files, sorting
the folder over & over & over when once would do. It's acceptable when a
list has 2 messages a day but when it grows to 75....]
To make subject sorting (at least mh's sorting) work properly I have to
deal with the extraordinary number of weird subject symbols that are
sprouting up: Re[*], Re(*), FW:, Sv:, (Fwd), & probably others.
I can deal with this in the recursive rule, item b), for digests where
the original destination (to:, or cc:) is preserved, but many other
digests have had theirs deleted. If I processed them recursively they
wind up in my main mailbox because they have lost their context.
Is this explanation understandable? Any ideas how I can deal with this
problem?
I have filtering issues with most digests. In some cases I'm only
interested in a particular marked subject, or the messages of a certain
person, & in other cases I want to remove some particular subject or
person (or spam). The issue is similar to that mentioned above, but
I cannot have these filtering rules operating outside the specific
context of the mailing list.
What I really need is a programming guide! Any advice appreciated.