procmail
[Top] [All Lists]

Using References: and/or In-Reply-To: headers

2006-06-21 13:30:50
procmail can use formail to check for duplicate Message-ID: headers 
(numbers) and act accordingly.... that's cool, though a little myopic in 
the design. :-)

(A more general solution would be to specify which header formail -D 
looks at, perhaps defaulting to Message-ID:)

But... the concept got me thinking about similar processing of the 
References: and/or In-Reply-To: headers.

The idea ... I subscribe to some high-volume mailing lists...
The messages I post to the list are also sent to me... and a procmail 
recipe "detects" those and flags for me...

Now... wouldn't it be cool if I could add the message ID of *my* message 
to some file/db (similar to the msgid.cache file used with formail -D) 
and then, as I receive new messages for that list, I check the 
"referto.cache" and flag the incomng message accordingly.

That way, for such high-volume mailing lists, I can help ensure that I 
see any/all replies to my postings.

There ARE some basic problems with it... but generally I think it sounds 
like a cool idea.
The potential problem is that in some cases, I have received replies 
before I received my own posting... so the References:/In-Reply-To: 
header wouldn't match. BUT... MOST of the time, that's not a problem.

Any ideas? I suppose this is more of a "formail" enhancement rather than 
a "procmail" thing.... but it seems like a good thing for procmail 
users. :-)

hmmm, the more I think about this the more I think I'll see abot 
creating a PMR/RFE what have you for formail. :-)

Thanks,
Don

____________________________________________________________
procmail mailing list   Procmail homepage: http://www.procmail.org/
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail