At 5:01 PM -0500 2/5/02, Lars Kellogg-Stedman is rumored to have typed:
avoid false positives (specifically targeted at Mr. Dunford's
"^TO_procmail"
recipe).
I think that's entirely a matter of personal opinion.
I don't; if Mr. Dunford joined the procmail-dev list, his filter _would_
immediately generate false positives because his filter condition isn't
unique enough, and he'd have to go back to figure out why. That isn't
opinion; but it IS specifically the recipe I was commenting on.
If you're trying to do something mission critical with your mail, sure, go
all out with the regular expressions
Er...I never mentioned regex, I only maintained that the filter condition
should be as unique as possible. You are certainly welcomed to filter any way
you wish; if we're giving newbies advice, however, it's important to make it
clear that the more unique the filter condition, the more likely the filter
will actually work as expected. (Witness the earlier example where someone
tried a recipe using my typo error, and then didn't even look to see _why_ it
failed.)
but mostly I'm just filtering recipes
into folders.
I, however, am not; I'm also removing subject munges, junking annoying
Reply-To munges, removing boilerplate footer pieces, dropping some poster's
mail into /dev/null (the poster may have something useful to say in list A,
but just be annoying in list B), and other manipulations on a list-by-list
basis. It would be problamatic if I started beating up on non-list mail
simply because I wasn't specific enough in my condition. And since I know I'm
not, it's safe that we can't assume that every person asking a question here
is simply dropping mail into subdirectories and getting around to it in a
timely fashion. (This is why I frequently use Reply-To-All, and prefer people
respond to me the same way; I disagree strongly with Mr. Straw's
characterization. I don't always read list mail every day...I _do_ read my
personal mail. Of course, using TO would filter _both_ copies into the
listmail box, which is not what I want to do; hence the use of the
X-BeenHere:, X-Loop:, List-*:, etc. header fields to seperate mail sent from
the list server from mail sent by a human.)
Anyway, my point stands; many of the problems with procmail recipies (and
frequently examples posted to this list) deal not with regex or other
esoteria but with simple recipies accidentally clobbering too much (witness
the recurring false-positive virus alert threads that show up here) because
of inspecific conditions. If one strives for a condition containing a
_unique_ piece of information, it takes no longer to write the recipe, even a
simple filtering recipe (or even prepare for writing the recipe, unless one
doesn't know how to show all headers in one's email client) and saves having
to _rewrite_ the recipe later.
Charlie
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