On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Ken Scott wrote:

> Wouldn't an appropriate ruleset be something like
>
> body FIND_MY_NAME_RULE  /tom\bjones/i
> score FIND_MY_NAME_RULE -10.0
> describe FIND_MY_NAME_RULE    simple rule looks for the user name

The general idea sounds promising, though I think you'd probably want to test
it for a while.

Your regexp won't work, though, because \b matches the zero length boundary
between a word character and a non-word character.  But you're asserting a word
character on both sides (m and j), so it can't possibly match.  I'd suggest
instead something like

body FIND_MY_NAME_RULE  /\btom jones\b/i

Though there are a lot of variants depending on what you want to allow (for
instance, can there be a middle name?  If so, do we care what it is?)  For Tom
Albert Jones we could do something fancy like

body FIND_MY_NAME_RULE /\bT(?:om|homas) (?:A(?:\.|l(?:bert)?)? )?Jones\b/i

To accept Thomas Albert Jones, Tom A Jones, or any number of other things.

I also suspect this would depend a lot on the kind of spam you, personally,
get.  I know on one my Yahoo! account, where I foolishly filled in my real
information, I get lots of spam that has my name in it.  Not sure how they got
it, but they definitely seem to have it.  So it probably wouldn't work for
everyone, but might work well for you.  If you have a constant sig, you could
also create rules with parts of it, so that real replies to you would get a
bonus (while, unfortunately, rewarding people who don't trim their replies.
C'est la vie).
-- 
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/

You said love was just a lie, but I could tell that you were lying.
                --They Might Be Giants

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