moving mails apart upon special pattern in subject line

after spending an hour in the mutt manual without success:
How to move mails into some other place (other set of mails)
upon a special known pattern in the subject line?

(sorry, I am not familiar with different sets of mails
although long-time user of mutt)

--
--Peter.Hermann@ihr.uni-stuttgart.de (+49)0711-685-872-44(Fax79)
--Nobelstr.19 Raum 0.030, D-70569 Stuttgart IHR Hoechstleistungsrechnen
--http://www.ihr.uni-stuttgart.de/

On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:43:09 +0000 (UTC), Peter Hermann wrote:
> after spending an hour in the mutt manual without success:
> How to move mails into some other place (other set of mails)
> upon a special known pattern in the subject line?
>
> (sorry, I am not familiar with different sets of mails
> although long-time user of mutt)

Have you looked at procmail?

Mike

Peter Hermann <ica2ph@lucky.ihr.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:
> after spending an hour in the mutt manual without success:
> How to move mails into some other place (other set of mails)
> upon a special known pattern in the subject line?
>
When do you want this move to happen? I.e. automatically before you
even get to read the mail (which means you need procmail or getmail or
something similar) or after you have read the mail (in which case I'm
not quite sure what you need).

> (sorry, I am not familiar with different sets of mails
> although long-time user of mutt)
>
[Yes I do know that getmail is a fetchmail alternative really rather
than an procmail alternative but it can do procmail type things as
well as fetchmail ones]

--
Chris Green

thank you Mike and Chris.

in the mutt manual, procmail occurs once.
I found "threading" thereafter, but dont know how to...
(I cant see the forest due to so many trees ;-)

Some grouping would be nice, e.g.:
My local server (up front) delivers suspect emails with a
leading string "***spam***" in the subject line.
The only functionality I need would be
somehow isolating those mails and to look casually at them
and then deleting the whole bunch (e.g. every 3 days).
The only command I know is mutt and its .muttrc data
with several hundreds of aliases.
I have no idea about the concept of procmail.

Peter


tinnews@isbd.co.uk wrote:
> Peter Hermann <ica2ph@lucky.ihr.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:
> > after spending an hour in the mutt manual without success:
> > How to move mails into some other place (other set of mails)
> > upon a special known pattern in the subject line?
> >
> When do you want this move to happen? I.e. automatically before you
> even get to read the mail (which means you need procmail or getmail or
> something similar) or after you have read the mail (in which case I'm
> not quite sure what you need).
>
> > (sorry, I am not familiar with different sets of mails
> > although long-time user of mutt)
> >
> [Yes I do know that getmail is a fetchmail alternative really rather
> than an procmail alternative but it can do procmail type things as
> well as fetchmail ones]
>

--
--Peter.Hermann@ihr.uni-stuttgart.de (+49)0711-685-872-44(Fax79)
--Nobelstr.19 Raum 0.030, D-70569 Stuttgart IHR Hoechstleistungsrechnen
--http://www.ihr.uni-stuttgart.de/

Peter Hermann schrieb:

> Some grouping would be nice, e.g.:
> My local server (up front) delivers suspect emails with a leading string
> "***spam***" in the subject line. The only functionality I need would be
> somehow isolating those mails and to look casually at them and then
> deleting the whole bunch (e.g. every 3 days). The only command I know is
> mutt and its .muttrc data with several hundreds of aliases. I have no
> idea about the concept of procmail.
>
> Peter

Hello Peter,

some time ago I have had the same problem like you. The program you are
looking for is one which divides your mail and your spam. Mutt is just an
mail-reader, for dividing mail you need procmail. I would recommend you to
try procmail, it is the easiest way of spam handling.

But be careful with deleting spam! Maybe you delete a mail which was
misclassified? For that problem I've written a small howto and script,
which sends a summary of new spam and another script which deletes the
spam after seven days.

http://wwwstud.rz.uni-leipzig.de/~pg...utomation.html

The thing you have to change is the line

* ^X-CRM114-Status: SPAM.*

into

* ^Subject: \*\*\*spam\*\*\**

This works fine for me. If you have any questions, ask. :-)

Ciao, Uwe

PS: Maybe there is someone who would translate this page into English?
This would be great.

Peter Hermann <ica2ph@lucky.ihr.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:
> tinnews@isbd.co.uk wrote:
> > Peter Hermann <ica2ph@lucky.ihr.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:
> > > after spending an hour in the mutt manual without success:
> > > How to move mails into some other place (other set of mails)
> > > upon a special known pattern in the subject line?
> > >
> > When do you want this move to happen? I.e. automatically before you
> > even get to read the mail (which means you need procmail or getmail or
> > something similar) or after you have read the mail (in which case I'm
> > not quite sure what you need).
> >
> > > (sorry, I am not familiar with different sets of mails
> > > although long-time user of mutt)
> > >
> > [Yes I do know that getmail is a fetchmail alternative really rather
> > than an procmail alternative but it can do procmail type things as
> > well as fetchmail ones]
> >
> thank you Mike and Chris.
>
> in the mutt manual, procmail occurs once.
> I found "threading" thereafter, but dont know how to...
> (I cant see the forest due to so many trees ;-)
>
> Some grouping would be nice, e.g.:
> My local server (up front) delivers suspect emails with a
> leading string "***spam***" in the subject line.
> The only functionality I need would be
> somehow isolating those mails and to look casually at them
> and then deleting the whole bunch (e.g. every 3 days).
> The only command I know is mutt and its .muttrc data
> with several hundreds of aliases.
> I have no idea about the concept of procmail.
>
Right, you need something like procmail, or maildrop, or getmail.
These are utilities that deliver your mail with the ability to filter
it and put it in different mailboxes according to various criteria.

E.g. you could put all mail with Subject: Programming into a mailbox
programming. Or you could put all mail from a certain mailing list
into one mailbox. Or you could (as you describe) put all mail with
'spam' in the subject line into a special mailbox.

These utilities are completely independent from mutt, they do what
they do before you even run mutt.

What system are you running mutt on? Many Linux systems will have
procmail already installed, try 'man procmail'. Procmail is a little
quirky in the way you set it up but it is the 'brand leader' of mail
filtering utilities. The man pages for procmail and procmailrc are
pretty good at getting a beginner going.

--
Chris Green

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Hash: SHA1

> after spending an hour in the mutt manual without success:
> How to move mails into some other place (other set of mails)
> upon a special known pattern in the subject line?

Many people are suggesting some form of pre-filter like procmail. That may
or may not be the best solution depending on your circumstances. This is
more of a direct answer to your question. I'd use the following procedure:

1. Tag all items matching a specific pattern.
- See section 2.3.1 (Getting Started/Reading Mail/The
Message Index) of the mutt HTML manual, specifically
table 2.3
- Use the `T' key for `Tag messages matching a pattern'
2. Produce a pattern for the subject line
- See section 4.2 (Advanced Usage/Patterns) specifically
table 4.1
- use the `~s' modifier to query message subjects
3. Move all tagged items to a destination
- The key used to save a single message is `s'
- To apply this to all tagged messages use the `;' modifier
first. See section 4.3 (Advanced Usage/Using Tags)
4. Provide your destination

Putting it all together would yield an example key sequence of:

T ~s ^\*\*spam\*\* ;s =spam
- --
Ben Secrest <blsecres@gmail.com>
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9NjhQ6pjDsOKYtPfhUSejRw=
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Ben Secrest <blsecres@gmail.com>:
>
> > after spending an hour in the mutt manual without success:
> > How to move mails into some other place (other set of mails)
> > upon a special known pattern in the subject line?
>
> Many people are suggesting some form of pre-filter like procmail. That may
> or may not be the best solution depending on your circumstances. This is
> more of a direct answer to your question. I'd use the following procedure:
>
> 1. Tag all items matching a specific pattern.
> 2. Produce a pattern for the subject line
> 3. Move all tagged items to a destination
> 4. Provide your destination
>
> Putting it all together would yield an example key sequence of:
>
> T ~s ^\*\*spam\*\* ;s =spam

Excellent advice. I'll add look into fcc-hook, folder-hook, and
save-hook. They define what happens to the received mail, such as
automatically knowing to save replies to family mails in the "family"
folder.

These are mailing lists I'm on for which I don't need a local copy
since the list is sending me one:

fcc-hook (libranet\
|zsh\-users\
) '/dev/null'


--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
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