Scoring .. what is it's purpose

2001-09-09 Thread Cliff Sarginson

After a long time using mutt I am trying to understand
more of it's features.
- What is the purpose/use of scoring of mail messages?
- Can i mark a message as undeletable (and reverse that)
-- 

Regards
Cliff



Re: Scoring .. what is it's purpose

2001-09-09 Thread David Champion

On 2001.09.09, in [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Cliff Sarginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 - What is the purpose/use of scoring of mail messages?

I'm sure that people use it in different ways, but fundamentally, it's
just a ratings system. You can value/devalue messages according to the
results of one or more matching operators, and then act on the message
according to the sum of those ratings. You can look at it as a way of
combining lots of different matching operations disjointly - rather than
saying

if (a and b and c) then mark as important
if (a and b and d) then mark as junk
if (a and b and e) then mark as ordinary
... plus many other combinations

you can say

if (a) then increase score by 25
if (b) then increase score by 25
if (c) then increase score by 50
if (d) then decrease score by 100
if (e) then decrease score by 5
if (score  0) then mark as junk
if (score = 100) then mark as important

You can use scoring to filter out suspected junk mail, or to prioritize
messages from co-workers over those from friends, or to make messages
from Outlook Express users disappear under a limit, all by tying rules
together rather than by writing more complex rules.

Another, simpler summary: it's a stateful property of a message that can
be manipulated by any number of successive rules.


 - Can i mark a message as undeletable (and reverse that)

As far as I know, not without some severe shenanigans.

You could bind your 'd' key to some function that deletes the message,
then filters it to a program that evaluates the message's X-No-Delete:
header, say, and copies it to a file if it's delete-locked, then appends
that file to your current folder. Other bindings would insert/remove an
X-No-Delete: header into/from the current message.

That would do it, I think, but I'd reconsider how badly you want this
functionality before trying it. Or ask someone for a patch.

-- 
 -D.[EMAIL PROTECTED]NSITUniversity of Chicago