On 29 Jul 2004 I wrote:
Another option with Pine is to put the score into one of the
headers that Pine can sort on. [...]
Ryan uses 'scorE' but Pine needs to do work to calculate the Pine
scorE so I use the Cc header. And as Ryan suggested I include CC
in my Pine index-format so it appears on the index screen.
Someone emailed me privately and asked me about this. I'm
replying here because it might be interesting to others and maybe
someone will have a better idea (because I know this is quite
hacky). Here's an excerpt of my procmailrc:
# The SpamAssassin star character defaults to '*' but I use 'R' (for 'Red')
:0
* ^X-Spam-Level: RR
{
:0 fhw
| formail -R Cc: Newsgroups: \
-R X-Spam-Level: Cc:
:0
.--red/
}
What this does is for any message that has a score of 2 or more,
it renames the Cc: header to Newsgroups: and then renames the
X-Spam-Level: header to Cc:. Then I have the Pine index-format
display both the Cc and the Newsgroups header and I have my
'--red' mailbox default to being sorted (ordered) by the Cc
header. Non-spam bubbles to the top of my '--red' box and if I
want to reply, I type 'R' (for Reply) and pine asks me if I want
to post my reply to the Newsgroup (thus warning me that there
were originally Cc'd addresses).
So far this is working fine for me and it's nice that I no longer
have to remember to edit the Subject when I reply to a non-spam
message that has a spam subject_tag (which is the way I used to
do things). I've written more about what I do with Procmail and
SpamAssassin in
Reverse Spam Filtering: Winning Without Fighting
<http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/spam/>
and
Using SpamAssassin section of the Procmail Quick Start
<http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/#SA>
I haven't yet written about this Cc trick, but now I can link to
this message!
We really need a standard header for the score so that mail
clients can be updated to support displaying and sorting on this
header. I think that this is one of the goals of the
Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)
expecially the
Filtering Standards Subgroup
which you can learn about here:
<http://asrg.sp.am/subgroups/filtering.shtml>
I quoted the above because maybe if I say it enough it will
happen :-)
Nancy
Infinite Ink
www.ii.com
