[CentOS] procmail, and the care and feeding of mailing list content received

R P Herrold

herrold at owlriver.com
Thu Jun 7 20:15:40 UTC 2007


Some threads just go on too long.  Personally I think a troll 
has hijacked the main centos list again and is inducing food 
fight behaviours while that troll perfectly 'innocently' 
asserting that it is just respoding to all email.

see:
 	http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645
for a discussion of the problem of 'capture' in FOSS projects.

But if one loses interest in a thread, it is easy enough to 
tune them out:

1.  Install procmail;  yum knows how


2.  Add a mark and drop ruleset

[herrold at new .procmail]$ cat ~/.procmail/killfilerc
#
#       mark them
:0fh
^ *List-Id:.*centos\.centos\.org
^ *Subject:.*CentOS Based Linux Firewall Document
*!^X-brand
         | formail -A "X-brand: killfile "

# and dump them
:0 w
* ^X-brand: killfile
         /dev/null


3.  Integrate it in mailhandling; a fragment from:
 	/home/herrold/.procmailrc

#       easy drops
INCLUDERC=$HOME/.procmail/killfilerc


-----------------------------------

easy enough to save 'caught' pieces to a file, rather than 
devnull until you are certain collateral damage has not been 
induced; see the procmail manpage series for a full 
discussion.

-- Russ Herrold



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