I use the Linux operating system on my PC instead of Microsoft Windows, for ethical and technical reasons explained on my website:
http://www.cosmicpenguin.com/ If you're using procmail to process your incoming mail, in, e.g., Linux, BSD, OSX, etc., you can insert a [Vo] (or similar) tag into the Subject line of incoming vortex-l messages by adding this "recipe" (as such entries are called) to your .procmailrc file: :0 fhw * ^X-Mailing-List: <[email protected]> * !^Subject: .*\[Vo.*\] | sed 's/^Subject: /&[Vo] /' The first line begins the recipe. The "f" flag causes the pipe command in the fourth line to act as a filter for the message, i.e., the message is processed through it and procmail then continues testing further recipes to handle the filtered (modified) version of the message. The "h" flag causes the message header (not the body) to be fed to the pipe command. The "w" flag causes procmail to wait until the pipe finishes execution before proceeding. The second line tests that the message contains the header line "X-Mailing-List: <[email protected]>", which all vortex-l messages do (at least the recent ones that I looked at). This is the main test to detect that the message comes from the list. Some messages don't contain the list name in the "To:" header line, or even the "Cc:" line (if the list was named in the "Bcc:" line by the poster). The third line of the recipe tests that the Subject line of the message does not already contain a string of the form [Vo...] or [vo...]. If people use this method to add a [Vo] tag to incoming vortex-l messages and then they respond to the messages, their outgoing responses will contain the tag in the Subject line, and it will be received as such by list subscribers. So procmail should not add a second tag to such received messages. The regular expression \[Vo.*\] is used so that any tag with square brackets beginning with Vo will be detected ( [Vo], [vortex], [Vort], etc. ). Since procmail test conditions use egrep-style regular expressions, the square brackets have to be escaped (with "\") so they act as ordinary characters (rather than having their special meaning as part of regular expression syntax). The fourth line pipes the message header through the sed (stream-editor) program to perform the actual insertion of the tag into the Subject line. When sed finds the string "Subject: " at the beginning ("^") of a header line, it substitutes ("s") something for that. What it substitutes is what it just found ("&"), followed by the string "[Vo] ". Since sed uses the earlier grep-style regular expressions, the square brackets act as ordinary characters when they are _not_ escaped by "\". You can replace [Vo] in the fourth line with [Vortex], [Vort], [vortex-l], etc., to suit your taste, as long as it has square brackets and begins with "vo" (in upper or lower case), so it will be detected by the third line of the recipe when it comes back through the list server. There are plenty of procmail tutorials on the Web; just google for "procmail". This is a rather esoteric usage for it. Mostly I just use it to divert messages from certain idiots (none on this list) into spam files, which is much simpler. Regular expressions, and sed, are also pretty simple once you get familiar with them, and they're extremely useful. In general, Linux is as easy to use as MS-Windows, if you have someone install it for you (which your local Linux user group will do for free -- see my website), like the PC store installs Windows. And it's much more powerful and reliable, as well as free. And if you want respect, well, it's absolutely essential: http://www.nata2.info/humor/flash/switchlinux3.swf Mark
