At 22:25 2007-01-04 +0800, DR. Lee - NS3 wrote:
Thank you for taking the trouble to explain the issue of MessageID and
for a non-expert, I found reading the RFC is a tough job. However I do
get the idea of an unique id for purpose of perhaps, indexing.
There's also duplicate checking - for instance, a message addresssed to YOU
and to the LIST (or even, more than one list which you're on). If sent as
a single message with multiple recipients, all incarnations of that message
bear the same Message-ID (excepting if the sending systems are woefully
malconfigured and fail to generate and insert a Message-ID before
transmission). Then of course, tracking references, which is what is being
done here.
However this does not seem to fullfil the function that other writer
intended - that is a list for checking the junk mail or preventing
uninterested mail. The question is then how to decide a mail is
uninterested?
The process was described early in the thread.
While reading the messages in his MUA, he forwards messages which are
_particularly_ uninteresting (off-topic, severe degredations of a topic,
etc), to a simple process that grabs the Message-ID of THAT message and
adds it to a datanase. The procmail recipe then checks the In-Reply-To:
and References: headers of subsequently received messages to see if they
reference that message - i.e. are in reply to it, or a message which itself
was a reply to it.
The two weak points are that if you recevied a bunch of email and THEN
started flagging a few uninteresting threads, the messages you've ALREADY
received aren't pulled from your (already processed by procmail) mailbox;
and you've got to manually flag crap.
Procedurally, it's not a whole lot different than taking junkmail and
pulling it from your regular mailbox and stuffing it into a "junkmail"
folder (rather than deleting it), excepting that junkmail generally doesn't
garner replies (unless posted on a discussion list, where half a dozen
idiots will propogate it by posting that it's not appropriate there, even
though the poster will never read their replies).
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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