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Re: duplicate emails from 2 separate lists

2000-07-20 12:03:11
At 14:08 2000-07-20 -0400, NEW York wrote:

I get the same email  which has been posted to 2 separate
mailing lists sorted out in 2 folders. Is it possible in procmail
to mark the message as Read on the other folder if i had read
the duplicate messages in one of the folders.

There are several basic problems here:

* "marking as read" is a function of your mail reader (elm, pine, emacs, etc), not the MDA (procmail in this case). Sure, if your reader embeds a status into the message headers, procmail could be made to mark messages with that same header status, but actually identifying received duplicates or other messages you've read is a problematic process. If you were to be re-running procmail on every invocation of your mailer so as to re-process for read messages, that might work, but it'd be extremely painful if you have many stored messages.

* messages delivered by different lists will often have separate messageid's, sometimes even slightly different subjects (some lists prepend a listname, etc), and message bodies may not be the same thanks to banners and footers often added by lists. This complicates matters for trying to positively identify a duplicate message when it isn't coming from the same list, because the standard mechanisms available won't work.

* You have the problem that messages will not always arrive in order - one list always arriving first, so it'd be difficult to flag a message as a duplicate consistently within one list and just "pre mark" it as read for the others -- that is, taking preference that list "A" is the one you would normally READ it in, and list "B" as the one that would be marked read because the message appeared in list "A". This is a minour issue if you just want to make sure that any dupes - wherever they may be - are marked, but it still hinges on the previous problem - positively identifying cross-list dupes to begin with.

---
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.

 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
 Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA  94912-2395


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