[TUHS] off-topic list

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:15:42 -0600 arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 23 Jun 2018, Michael Parson wrote:
> >
> > > The first rule in my .procmailrc does this with formail:
> >
> > Anyone with any concept of security will not be running Procmail; it's not 
> > even supported by its author any more, due to its opaque syntax and likely 
> > vulnerabilities (it believes user-supplied headers and runs shell commands 
> > based upon them).
> >
> > -- Dave VK2KFU
> 
> So what is the alternative?  I've been using it for years with
> a pretty static setup to route incoming mail to different places.
> I need *something* to do what it does.

My crude method has worked better than anything else for me.
[in used for over two decades]

As I read only a subset of messages from mailing lists, if I
directly filed such messages into their own folders, I would
either have to waste more time scanning much larger mail
folders &/or miss paying attention to some messages even
once[1].

Fortunately, in MH one can use named sequences (that map to
set of picked messages). In essence, I use sequences as "work
space" and other folders as storage space.

For example

  $ <run spam filtering script>
  $ pick -seq me -to bakul -or -cc bakul -or -bcc bakul 
  $ pick -seq tuhs -to tuhs at tuhs -or -cc tuhs at tuhs
  ...

When I have some idle time, I type

  $ inc # to incorporate new messages into inbox
  $ pickall # my script for creating sequences

Next I scan these sequences in a priority order to see if
anything seems interesting and then process these messages.
Once done, I file them into their own folders and move on to
the next sequence. The whole process takes a few minutes at
most[2] and at the end the inbox is "zeroed"! By zeroing it
each time, I ensure that the next time I will be processing
only new messages, and typically spend less than a second per
message summary line.

[1] This happens to me on Apple Mail.
[2] Unless I decide to reply!