Mail Filtering Best Practices

Thu Feb 20 14:42:52 PST 2003

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 03:42:30PM -0500, Chuck Yerkes wrote:

> No, I find that many (most) people, even system admins, send back
> to ALL, not just to the list.  I'm on the list,  I don't want to
> get it into my INBOX as well.   As threads grow, I find myself
> getting messages replying to things I no longer care about.

It is not difficult to cache message-ids and deliver subsequent
identical ones to /dev/null.  The easiest way I've found to do this is
to check the return code of "formail -D".  This method is also handy in
that it yields for you the desired behaviour with a single procmail
recipe.  Your current strategy only works with the 2% or so of Internet
e-mail users who follow your own methodology.  Because this methodology
contradicts the best practices proposed in "Considered Harmful" it seems
likely that only a tiny minority will adopt that methodology.

> You want to send me a message, then spent a moment and look at the
> headers.

That's asking an awful lot of most people, even if they are in the habit
of manually sanity-checking mail headers.

> It's a discussion list, I set (actually mutt does the work for me)
> the reply-to header back to the list.  It's my right.  It's not
> the list doing it.

I wouldn't presume to trample on your rights, I only seek to amend your
wrongs.

> Sometimes, I'll Bcc the originator, but that's just to ensure that
> if s/he, like me, doesn't read his baylisa folder regularly, that
> s/he gets to see it.  Bcc so that when someone does Reply-To of
> THIS, they dont' get two.  See?  I'm nice.

Another common filtering rule in the SPAM Age, is that e-mail that is
not addressed TO you in the envelope is more likely to be SPAM.  If you
want to send a message TO someone, then it seems a very good idea to
mark the envelope appropriately.

Over the years, I've come up with this general algorithm:
1) Check with Spam software.  If Spam, file in "Spam".
2) Check against headers added by various list managers, file in list
   folders.
3) If mail is addressed TO me in the headers, it goes in Inbox.
4) Anything left over goes to Inbox or Spam, depending on the efficacy
   of step 1. :)

Duplicate-ID supression works in this scheme as well, anywhere before
step 2.  I'm thinking this might be a fun article, so I'm keeping this
on baylisa to solicit feedback.

-danny

-- 
http://dannyman.toldme.com/