CentOS - Jun 2007 - procmail, and the care and feeding of mailing list content received

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

speed kills of course -- In my immediate prior post, I 
reversed the match and the anchor operators.

^ *List-Id:.*centos\.centos\.org
^ *Subject:.*CentOS Based Linux Firewall Document

should have been

* ^List-Id:.*centos\.centos\.org
* ^Subject:.*CentOS Based Linux Firewall Document

of course.  Fortunately, in my local setup I had set content 
to be dropped to be saved to a file while I tested.

-- Russ Herrold

Hi Russ,

Thanks for this hint.  I have a couple of questions.

On 6/7/07, R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com> wrote:
> :0fh
> * ^List-Id:.*centos\.centos\.org
This is a handy way of filtering by the mailing list name.  Thanks.
> * ^Subject:.*Some subject line here
> *!^X-brand
>          | formail -A "X-brand: killfile "
>
> # and dump them
> :0 w
> * ^X-brand: killfile
>          /dev/null
Could you explain why you are going through killfile here?  For
example, can't you just do:

:0:
* ^(From|Sender|Received):.*Perrin
/dev/null

if you do not want anything from a person named Perrin?  I have lines
like that in my filter (not with 'Perrin' by the way) and it seems to
be working.  As you can tell, I am not very familiar with procmail
filter format.

Akemi
> -- Russ Herrold