Hello, After five years of intensive mutt use I finally started using scoring (especially since applying that wonderful nntp patch ;). I only have a small problem with the escaping rules and syntax of the "score" commands in my .muttc: folder-hook . unscore ## assign a positive score to all messages folder-hook . score ~A 10 ## kill lame posts from mailing lists folder-hook =[a-z] score ~s'(newbie\\|(un)?subscribe\\|no\\\ subject\\|your\\\ mail)' -10 folder-hook =[a-z] score ~s'^\\\ *(test\\|(re:\\\ )?help\\|)\\\ *$' -10 1) After trial and error I finally understood that spaces must be escaped by three (!) backslashes. Is there a better way? I tried using "" but then mutt complains about "unmatched ( or \" 2) How can I cure the leaning-toothpick syndrome in these recipes? 3) Also I couldn't manage to AND or OR together several pattern matches in one score argument, mutt complains of "score: too many arguments" All in all I'd like to better understand how quoting works in the .muttrc. 4) When trying to match folders from my ~/Mail directory starting with a lowercase alphabetic character, is this the proper way? folder-hook =[a-z] It seems the match is case insensitive, but [:lower:] doesn't work there. Thanks in advance for your help, cheers, -- > > Now John, let's keep it all in perspective: ALTER TABLE / ADD CONSTRAINT > > not working isn't going to cost you your job or anything, is it? > I've taken my dried frog pills and I'm feeling much better :-) Yeah, aren't they wonderful? I'm worried about the worldwide depletion of the amphibian populations, though. ;-)