OT: help with email list reading programs w/ best features to read the centos and other lists that can filter people etc
we need to filter out various peoples posts on this list
would some kind soul(s) please direct us in locating the best email list reading programs w/ the best features to read the centos and other lists.
the CentOS list signal/noise ratio is so bad that we need something better than just outlook like clients or whatever
appropriate windows and linux recommendations would be most appreciated
thank you in advance
- rh
On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 12:46 PM, R - elists wrote:
we need to filter out various peoples posts on this list
would some kind soul(s) please direct us in locating the best email list reading programs w/ the best features to read the centos and other lists.
It's not an email program but I think it has the best filtering capabilities of all - the brain.
the CentOS list signal/noise ratio is so bad that we need something better than just outlook like clients or whatever
Huh? What signal/noise ratio? I don't see any of the usual "can't be bother to read manuals/to use google" suspects...unless you're complaining about our most recent top poster...
appropriate windows and linux recommendations would be most appreciated
How about mutt as a client?
Christopher,
It's not an email program but I think it has the best filtering capabilities of all - the brain.
umm, yeah, exactly, i want to use my brain to program certain peoples posts from never reaching my eyeballs
arent they called threaded email readers?
i really didnt find much on the www yet maybe i should have been looking for old style nntp type readers?
maybe that is what i need to check into
Huh? What signal/noise ratio? I don't see any of the usual "can't be bother to read manuals/to use google" suspects...unless you're complaining about our most recent top poster...
obviously signal/noise is always relevant and your tolerance is different than ours.
sometimes people on the list just get beligerant, drunk, and/or stupid and need to be filtered.
- rh
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:15 AM, R - elists lists07@abbacomm.net wrote:
sometimes people on the list just get beligerant, drunk, and/or stupid and need to be filtered.
But filters tend to be stupid as well. And once you are involved in a conversation you should have a certain responsibility to follow it to the bitter end. Filters mostly don't understand that (but gmail will push a reply to your own message into the 'important' view).
But filters tend to be stupid as well. And once you are involved in a conversation you should have a certain responsibility to follow it to the bitter end. Filters mostly don't understand that (but gmail will push a reply to your own message into the 'important' view).
i hear ya Les
thing is, the term plonk from a most recent post reminded me what i am looking for, ie killfile
...i just have to figure out how to best implement.
now, please dont get me wrong, ive made a mistake or three on lists, yet gave apology.
i am suprised that more folks havent spoken up about favorite "threaded email readers" or has everyone just gone to Thunderbird or other similar?
reason: some say changing subject or hijacking messes things up...
- rh
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:48 AM, R - elists lists07@abbacomm.net wrote:
But filters tend to be stupid as well. And once you are involved in a conversation you should have a certain responsibility to follow it to the bitter end. Filters mostly don't understand that (but gmail will push a reply to your own message into the 'important' view).
i hear ya Les
thing is, the term plonk from a most recent post reminded me what i am looking for, ie killfile
...i just have to figure out how to best implement.
now, please dont get me wrong, ive made a mistake or three on lists, yet gave apology.
i am suprised that more folks havent spoken up about favorite "threaded email readers" or has everyone just gone to Thunderbird or other similar?
reason: some say changing subject or hijacking messes things up...
Threads really only matter when responses are slow enough that you forget the context - in which case you probably aren't all that interested anyway. With thunderbird I normally don't use a threaded view but sometimes flip to it (which is sort of awkward except on a Mac where you can use OS facilities to map a key to a multi-step operation). But in gmail I do like their normal 'conversation' presentation where the previously read messages are mostly hidden but accessible with a click and the unread messages are all opened together with large blocks of quoted text mostly hidden. I'm used to reading 'backwards' in time order so I know what has already been answered, but the gmail view is a little nicer to see the new portion in order and in context.
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:48 AM, R - elists lists07@abbacomm.net wrote:
i am suprised that more folks havent spoken up about favorite "threaded email readers" or has everyone just gone to Thunderbird or other similar?
AFAIK, every recent mail client has threading support. They should all basically be feature-complete, as long as you are not asking for something *very* awkward. ;-)
Threads really only matter when responses are slow enough that you forget the context - in which case you probably aren't all that interested anyway.
Or when you are involved in several conversations at the same time, and don't want to get confused. Or when you want your e-mail correspondences (and especially mailing lists) to be sorted in a neat way, like a filesystem tree. It can be very convenient, I am using threaded view in KMail all the time, for all my e-mail activity --- very easy to organize e-mails in an intuitive way. :-)
With thunderbird I normally don't use a threaded view but sometimes flip to it (which is sort of awkward except on a Mac where you can use OS facilities to map a key to a multi-step operation). But in gmail I do like their normal 'conversation' presentation where the previously read messages are mostly hidden but accessible with a click and the unread messages are all opened together with large blocks of quoted text mostly hidden. I'm used to reading 'backwards' in time order so I know what has already been answered, but the gmail view is a little nicer to see the new portion in order and in context.
What I miss a lot in gmail's web interface is proper threading. That "conversation" organization of e-mails is essentially the same thing, only done worse. There is no way to distinguish sub-threads of a given thread. Everything within one "conversation" is being displayed linearly, instead of a natural tree-ordering. When a thread starts to branch out into several directions at the same time, gmail's "conversation" idea becomes worse than useless.
I use a gmail account on a regular basis, but try to avoid their web interface whenever I can. KMail is so much better (for me at least)... ;-)
HTH, :-) Marko
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com wrote:
Threads really only matter when responses are slow enough that you forget the context - in which case you probably aren't all that interested anyway.
Or when you are involved in several conversations at the same time, and don't want to get confused. Or when you want your e-mail correspondences (and especially mailing lists) to be sorted in a neat way, like a filesystem tree. It can be very convenient, I am using threaded view in KMail all the time, for all my e-mail activity --- very easy to organize e-mails in an intuitive way. :-)
I've never been able to sort things in a way that makes any sense - and I don't expect conversations to have any natural order. I just want a very good search mechanism to find anything based on any snippet I happen to remember or need at the time.
With thunderbird I normally don't use a threaded view but sometimes flip to it (which is sort of awkward except on a Mac where you can use OS facilities to map a key to a multi-step operation). But in gmail I do like their normal 'conversation' presentation where the previously read messages are mostly hidden but accessible with a click and the unread messages are all opened together with large blocks of quoted text mostly hidden. I'm used to reading 'backwards' in time order so I know what has already been answered, but the gmail view is a little nicer to see the new portion in order and in context.
What I miss a lot in gmail's web interface is proper threading. That "conversation" organization of e-mails is essentially the same thing, only done worse. There is no way to distinguish sub-threads of a given thread. Everything within one "conversation" is being displayed linearly, instead of a natural tree-ordering. When a thread starts to branch out into several directions at the same time, gmail's "conversation" idea becomes worse than useless.
True, but why do you care? Every message stands on its own and normally carries any needed quoted context. I just read unread messages and respond or not. The only place the history matters is if you want to see if the answer you are about to give (or need yourself) has already been posted. But if you are caught up on the unread messages in the conversation (which all show at once) you'll already know that, and in any case the branches in the history don't matter in this regard.
I use a gmail account on a regular basis, but try to avoid their web interface whenever I can. KMail is so much better (for me at least)...
I used to only log in when I wanted to search messages that I had deleted locally, but It has gotten a lot better, with many more options that you can activate in the settings. The one that matters the most to me is to auto-advance to the next unread conversation as you archive/delete the current one instead of re-displaying the inbox. It is still slightly clunky in how you have to do multi-selects and move things compared to native applications, but not bad overall and meshes conceptually with the way the gmail phone app works so it is easy to stay current when reading on the phone but put off replying until you have a better keyboard. And of course the web interface means you don't have to configure a bunch of stuff to get imap readers synchronized across all of your computers (which I did anyway with thunderbird - I just don't use it as often now).
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com wrote:
What I miss a lot in gmail's web interface is proper threading. That "conversation" organization of e-mails is essentially the same thing, only done worse. There is no way to distinguish sub-threads of a given thread. Everything within one "conversation" is being displayed linearly, instead of a natural tree-ordering. When a thread starts to branch out into several directions at the same time, gmail's "conversation" idea becomes worse than useless.
True, but why do you care? Every message stands on its own and normally carries any needed quoted context.
Oh, if only that were true all the time and with all posters... ;-)
I just read unread messages and respond or not. The only place the history matters is if you want to see if the answer you are about to give (or need yourself) has already been posted. But if you are caught up on the unread messages in the conversation (which all show at once) you'll already know that, and in any case the branches in the history don't matter in this regard.
One typical scenario is when I am interested in following one branch of a thread (i.e. a subthread), while I wish to ignore the rest. In KMail's threaded view this is trivial --- subthreads are just various branches in the thread tree, and I can always mark this branch as interesting, that as uninteresting, etc., and keep following only the interesting part of the thread. I typically don't have time to read through all messages in a well-sized thread. In gmail this is literally impossible, and I need to go through *all* messages in the conversation, since the interesting branches and unimportant branches are mixed together. It is just annoying when I have to scroll through the entire conversation, scanning every message for relevance. The SNR can become high within a thread, and it is a pain when all messages are displayed indiscriminantly.
I am using the gmail interface right now (unfortunately, I'm away from my laptop since last week), and it is already getting on my nerves in several threads on Fedora and CentOS lists.
Your usecase is probably different from mine. If you always have time to read through the whole thread, I agree that subthreading isn't important. But nevertheless, it's a pity that gmail's web interface doesn't support this, since there are people (like me) who would find proper threading very useful. In general I don't complain since KMail resolves this problem for me, but gmail devs would really gain some points in my eyes if they would implement real threading. ;-)
Best, :-) Marko
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com wrote:
One typical scenario is when I am interested in following one branch of a thread (i.e. a subthread), while I wish to ignore the rest. In KMail's threaded view this is trivial --- subthreads are just various branches in the thread tree, and I can always mark this branch as interesting, that as uninteresting, etc., and keep following only the interesting part of the thread.
I guess I've never believed that there would be no interesting posts in a branch with an uninteresting parent or vice versa. Is this a real statistical observation or just a guess?
I typically don't have time to read through all messages in a well-sized thread. In gmail this is literally impossible, and I need to go through *all* messages in the conversation, since the interesting branches and unimportant branches are mixed together.
Can't say that I really read everything but unless you are way behind you mostly see the individual messages in the inbox anyway without much structure in the unread portion, so you you can decide about most of it based on subject/sender.
Your usecase is probably different from mine. If you always have time to read through the whole thread, I agree that subthreading isn't important. But nevertheless, it's a pity that gmail's web interface doesn't support this, since there are people (like me) who would find proper threading very useful. In general I don't complain since KMail resolves this problem for me, but gmail devs would really gain some points in my eyes if they would implement real threading. ;-)
I'm starting to wonder how its fuzzy 'importance' concept works and if it will turn out to be a more important metric than some old upper-level parent post where the branch now has little in common with the point where you decide to watch or ignore. It is at least good at flagging responses to my own messages, something that thunderbird doesn't seem to understand. Anyway, keeping the inbox empty is new to me and using the web/phone readers is the first time I've been able to do it.
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com wrote:
One typical scenario is when I am interested in following one branch of a thread (i.e. a subthread), while I wish to ignore the rest. In KMail's threaded view this is trivial --- subthreads are just various branches in the thread tree, and I can always mark this branch as interesting, that as uninteresting, etc., and keep following only the interesting part of the thread.
I guess I've never believed that there would be no interesting posts in a branch with an uninteresting parent or vice versa. Is this a real statistical observation or just a guess?
Well, I don't know how do you define a real statistical observation, but I described the above scenario from my experience from a couple of mailing lists. What I can say is that it happens often enough to be statistically significant (for me, at least). Otherwise I wouldn't even notice gmail's lack of threading. :-)
I typically don't have time to read through all messages in a well-sized thread. In gmail this is literally impossible, and I need to go through *all* messages in the conversation, since the interesting branches and unimportant branches are mixed together.
Can't say that I really read everything but unless you are way behind you mostly see the individual messages in the inbox anyway without much structure in the unread portion, so you you can decide about most of it based on subject/sender.
You probably check your e-mail much more often than I do. I do it typically once per day, and in one day quite a big number of e-mails gets accumulated on CentOS and Fedora lists (other lists I'm subscribed to have nowhere near as much traffic). Estimating from memory, in 24 hours I receive approximately 15-25 e-mails on CentOS list, and around 40-50 on Fedora list (of course, these numbers may vary widely). That gives me on average around 30ish new posts to look at every day, while I may be interested in just 3-4 relevant ones. If those posts were not sorted properly into threads and subthreads, I would have to look at all of them, which is very time consuming and mostly a waste of my time. When I'm not actively involved in a thread, I make a rule never to spend more than 10 minutes per day for reading e-mail. ;-)
So, no, I typically don't look at individual messages, and rarely ever receive them one by one. What mostly happens is that every thread accumulates 5-10 posts per day, and I want to read only those that I know are interesting for me (those that continue the line of conversation I was interested in yesterday, and new threads with an interesting title). In gmail's interface I just cannot distinguish those two types from the rest, within a single thread.
Also, on a side note, I filter each mailing list traffic to an appropriate folder, so that posts from CentOS and Fedora lists never actually reach my inbox, but rather get into their own folders. I like to keep the inbox for personal communication, since that typically deserves more of my attention. So when someone sends an e-mail to *me*, it comes into inbox. When someone sends an e-mail to the CentOS list, it comes to the CentOS folder, and is put in its proper place in the branch of the thread. When I want to read CentOS mails, I just switch to that folder, and see all the relevant and irrelevant threads and branches at a glance, without even looking at the text of any individual message. Then I read just the ones tagged as interesting, and mark the others as irrelevant (if they are not marked already).
Back in the day I used to read everything, and it took me one hour every day. After some time I learned to be more efficient in e-mail reading. :-)
But I believe we are getting too tangential to what the OP wanted to know... ;-)
Best, :-) Marko
On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:46:53 -0700 R - elists wrote:
we need to filter out various peoples posts on this list
would some kind soul(s) please direct us in locating the best email list reading programs w/ the best features to read the centos and other lists.
the CentOS list signal/noise ratio is so bad that we need something better than just outlook like clients or whatever
Hello Mr. Elists (or may I call you R?)
Most email clients are capable of filtering incoming mail by subject, sender, and other fields. I note that you are using MS Outlook and I have absolutely no experience with that program, but any email client I've used in the past several years has allowed filtering in some manner.
My personal favourite email client is Sylpheed (which is available for both Linux and Windows -- you can find a pre-compiled Sylpheed rpm for Centos 5 and Centos 6 on my website if you're interested) and it can easily be used to filter and sort email by just about any field that you choose to use.
With Sylpheed, you can set it up to filter "Sender=Whoever" to "Trash" or "Delete from Server" if you want. Just look under the Configuration - Filter Settings menu; it's pretty self-explanatory.
Hello R,
On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:46:53 -0700 "R - elists" lists07@abbacomm.net wrote:
we need to filter out various peoples posts on this list
would some kind soul(s) please direct us in locating the best email list reading programs w/ the best features to read the centos and other lists.
the CentOS list signal/noise ratio is so bad that we need something better than just outlook like clients or whatever
appropriate windows and linux recommendations would be most appreciated
Claws Mail does that work for me for ages. Filtering (dispatching mails, quick filtering view), tagging, coloring, etc..
Regards,
On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 12:46:53 AM R - elists wrote:
we need to filter out various peoples posts on this list
would some kind soul(s) please direct us in locating the best email list reading programs w/ the best features to read the centos and other lists.
While I use Kmail (which can do very powerful filtering based on a number of criteria; I use the filters to folderize the list into its own CentOS folder, in addition to plonking senders), Outlook's junk mail filter can be configured to do what you're after.
Or, go to office.microsoft.com, and search for the phrase "Add a name to the Blocked Senders List" and I think you'll find what you want.
Lamar Owen wrote:
On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 12:46:53 AM R - elists wrote:
<snip>
While I use Kmail (which can do very powerful filtering based on a number
<snip> So how is kmail these days? I jumped ship to t-bird about '03 or '05, when I got tired of kmail munging my mbox (I tend to have thousands of emails stored there, before I get around to moving them to a dated folder...).
mark
On Wed, 2011-08-31 at 09:25 -0400, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
So how is kmail these days? I jumped ship to t-bird about '03 or '05, when I got tired of kmail munging my mbox (I tend to have thousands of emails stored there, before I get around to moving them to a dated folder...).
Why not store them in a correspondence database ? I wrote one which has capacity for 999,999 main entries, each entry can have 99 sub-entries and data can be retrieved by any partial key-word (6 different key word fields), date (partial of whole), reference number, partial match of main entry description, separate names database reference, text search. Main entries can be linked via key-words to other main entries and there is user settable 'revision date' so one can see what is overdue.
One can also email directly from within the database, which stores the outgoing email automatically.
Retrieval time is about 1 to 3 seconds providing the Internet is up.
Regards,
Always Programming.
On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 09:34:48 AM Always Learning wrote:
Why not store them in a correspondence database ?
Kmail is working towards full Akonadi integration, and the full 'semantic desktop' paradigm is (or will be) available.
So it's already being done, to a degree, and in a very flexible manner. Currently it is a tad slow with my >1 million e-mails in my archive, but it has been slower. Much slower.
On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 09:25:06 AM m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Lamar Owen wrote:
On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 12:46:53 AM R - elists wrote:
<snip> > While I use Kmail (which can do very powerful filtering based on a number <snip> So how is kmail these days?
Kmail beats the Dickens out of me sometimes.... A tale of two mailreaders.... 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'
It's been better (in ways), and it's been worse (much worse). The Scalix integration quit working upon an upgrade to KDE4 (don't really miss it that much), and if you do a large and long search, be sure to do a short one before you quit kmail, as it will redo the search to populate the 'Searches' folder *every time you start* and not tell you that is what it is doing; it just feels like it has hung, for however long the search may take (and my mail store is, uh, 8.3GB currently) ...
At the KDE SC 4.6.x level, things are about as stable as they've ever been, once you get Akonadi and Nepomuk operable. But this is the primary reason I'm somewhat loathe to go back down to KDE 4.3.4 in EL 6; I've forgotten what was broken at that level, and I'm used to what is currently working in F14.... which is partly why I'll periodically pop up and ask if anyone has done a KDE 4.6.x repo for EL6...
I'm at the moment happy with 1.13.7 that ships with KDE SC 4.6.5. It's crashed the least of any kmail I've run, since a long time ago (I forget just when I went to kmail (from Netscape Communicator), but it was, IIRC, in KDE 1.x days). I've kept essentially the same mailstore the whole time; it is a melange of maildir and mbox, depending upon how old the folder is... :-)
On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:46 PM, R - elists lists07@abbacomm.net wrote:
we need to filter out various peoples posts on this list
would some kind soul(s) please direct us in locating the best email list reading programs w/ the best features to read the centos and other lists.
the CentOS list signal/noise ratio is so bad that we need something better than just outlook like clients or whatever
appropriate windows and linux recommendations would be most appreciated
I didn't expect this, but I am beginning to like gmail's web interface better than dedicated mail programs. I used to use fetchmail to pull it to an imap server that I managed and accessed from various clients and my phone via imap, but for an assortment of reasons I want to retire that server and recently have been accessing gmail directly through imap, the gmail phone app, and the web interface, and after configuring the options a bit the web interface seems to be winning. It now has a fuzzy concept of 'important' mail that it can display first, and its folder operations are conceptually more like tagging where 'inbox' is just another tag, although from imap they appear as typical folders. The normal thing to do with disposed mail is to 'archive' it which puts it out of sight, but it still appears in searches and threaded conversation view - and being google, they obviously have better search capability than you are going to find in your own mail client. For me, the conceptual differences are more than making up for what you lose in a web-based interface - and when you want you can always use a real client via imap as long as you don't subscribe to the massive 'all mail' folder that holds the archive. I don't do any pre-filtering or sorting since you can just archive everything and still be able to find it in a search, but the facility is there if you want it and the results appear the same via multiple imap clients, the phone app, or the web interface. And yes, I know it is all just a ploy to get you to stay logged in all the time in the browser so your google search queries are tied to your login as well as your IP, but they are really, really good at it...
--On Tuesday, August 30, 2011 10:46 PM -0700 R - elists lists07@abbacomm.net wrote:
would some kind soul(s) please direct us in locating the best email list reading programs w/ the best features to read the centos and other lists.
My CentOS box is my mail server. It uses procmail as the delivery agent, so it honors the .procmailrc filter in every user's home directory. I use that to pre-deliver list mail to list-specific folders in my ~/mail hierarchy (~/Maildir if you use Maildir format) and then read the result with the Mulberry mail client and Dovecot as the IMAP server.
It should be straightforward to add additional filter rules to .procmailrc to either remove mail from selected senders or add flags that your email client would understand to hide or highlight. (I set the "important" flag to highlight messages from project administrators and messages that contain my address in the references headers (ie. replies to me).
-
Always Learning -
Christopher Chan -
Frank Cox -
Kenneth Porter -
Lamar Owen -
Les Mikesell -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
Marko Vojinovic -
R - elists -
wwp