On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 12:06:38AM +0000, Roger Burton West wrote: > I have heard rumours of filters for mailing lists that can bounce > postings based on excessive quoting and/or top-posting. Can anyone > point me to freeware implementations of these?
I thought I'd wait and see what sort of recommendations came forth, not having heard those rumors myself; all the "filters" I know of are manual, on fully-moderated lists, where the listmoms do the bouncing. I'm too lazy to monitor my lists that closely, and some of my more valued members are those who just can not be trained to use good etiquette. Maybe they're in too much of a hurry to edit all the crap their Microsoft mailer puts at the bottom of their reply, but we're grateful nonetheless for the info in that reply. Given that state of affairs, I chose to roll my own procmail-based filters, not to bounce submissions but to clean up the distributions, and I apply those filters just to my digest. Without the filtering, many of my digests would consist of a single article, saying "I agree!!!!" on top of a quoted^10 thread. Writing the filters wasn't particularly difficult, once I decided on the requirements (typical software, huh). I watch for ratios of quoted to unquoted text and the "nesting level" of the quotation, and try to keep the immediately-prior article if the poster has added enough new material. It turned out to be much easier to filter top-posted articles, which was good, given that those are much more likely to contain thoughtless quotation. Of course, there are some pathological cases where the filters decide it's just too hard, and they send the thing to the maintainer (that's me) for help, but that only seems to happen to one out of a thousand articles, so I can live with it. > (I can probably write my own, but other people have access to more > badly-written email than I do...) If you decide to roll your own, you'll probably want to tailer them to the quoting personality of your lists; I'm sure mine reflect the styles of my list's members. I'll admit there was a "training" period during which some follow-on development took place, adding a new class of pathological quotation, etc. If your lists are procmail based, I could share my meager efforts, for what they're worth. Cheers, Jim
