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RECIPE: strip/remove ads from hotmail/yahoo originated messages

2002-03-28 00:20:48
Hi, I was sick of those ads appended by free email services, so I wrote
this procmail recipe to remove them. I've tested it on a 3k message
mailspool and it stripped the advertisement off the tail of every message I
had from yahoo or hotmail (around 400). I went through the processed
spool's diffs and made sure it didn't go off the rails anywhere.

This method will also strip reply-chained ads, so "> > > Do You Yahoo!?"
is killed as well.

The method of extending this for other ad banners should be clear, and if
anyone does, I'd be happy to get a copy of your sed regex.

I'm still limiting the recipe by From:, so I do still see ads in replies from
other hosts, but I'll make it a blanket rule eventually.

  :0 fbw
  * ^From:.*@([^ ]\.)*yahoo\.com\>
  | sed -E -f ${PROCDIR}/sed-yahoo.com

  :0 fbw
  * ^From:.*@([^ ]\.)*hotmail\.com\>
  | sed -E -f ${PROCDIR}/sed-hotmail.com

sed-yahoo.com contains:

/^[> ]*_+$/{
     $!N
     $!N
     $!N
     $!N
     N
     /^[> ]*_+\n[> ]*Do You Yahoo!\?\n.*\n[> ]*http:.*yahoo\.com.*\n*/d
}

sed-hotmail.com contains:

/^[> ]*_+$/{
     $!N
     $!N
     /^[> ]*_+\n[> ]*.*(MSN|Hotmail|Free).*\n*.*http:.*(msn|hotmail)\.co.*/d
}

Comments and suggestions welcomed,
Aaron
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