Slashdot Mirror
Text-Mining Your E-mail
Misha writes "There have been a number of weeks/months in anyone's life that called for a better organization of your Inbox. filtering and folders work, but it'd be nice to have an text-mining tool running in the background that categorized incoming messages by topic as they arrive. It's nice to see that besides NLP research, there are some great algorithmic advances being done, as seen in this paper. Perhaps even one of them Perl monkeys will quickly hack such a background tool." Note: it's a PostScript file.
They'll end up finding a loophole in your filtering, or you'll end up filtering out real emails.
Only way to win is to kill it from the source. End of story.
Here's to the researchers. I would like:
* An email box that lets me extract the threads with my friends.
* An email box that automatically ages the files effectively archiving them. Some of my mail folders/files are huge now and it takes too long to append them when new mail arrives.
Yes, I realize I should get off my butt and do this, but it's faster to post on slashdot.
Here's a link to a terribly useful site for converting your postscripts and word docs into pdf or jpeg.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that having a good history of well filtered incoming, and especially just about all of my Outgoing (Outbox) available for searching. My Outbox has been a lifesaver several times when someone claims that they didn't have that (electronic) discussion with me. It's great to quote "in a message sent... ...I asked you to...".
That feature in the description is not text mining, just filtering.
-pyrrho
It automagically does full text indexing of all specified databases. To it, your Inbox is just another database.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Yeah, a link to an standard document format that you can get viewers for on almost every platform. Damn that's soo inconsiderate, where's those word documents?
This would be an awesome tool to block spam. If this program could look at the text of an email message and determine that it is a solicitation of some kind and then drop it into an email "pit" (you know, a folder mapped to /dev/null), that would make my life a LOT easier...
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
"that categorized incoming messages by topic as they arrive." - you can already sort messages into different folders depending on their topic by setting up rules.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Personally, I'd prefer that I simply get less email. The fact that we need NLP tools to pre-screen our email for us just shows how information-overloaded our society has become. What I really need is a tool at the sender's end that can pre-screen my email and tell the sender "Don't send this. He just doesn't care!"
I can sort reports from devices, co-workers, clients....each goes in its own folder....
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) was designed to centralize email information, I believe. If stored/implemented with a database, what more would you need ?
I think querying through SQL would satisfy most of us.. and be very useful in corporate environments (for example, query all email sent from a user to support), and it's already done by some projects like DBMAIL.
Anybody out there with experience using these ?
BTW, there's an extensive database of IMAP products including some that make the data accessible via LDAP... hours of fun!
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
Now we all now that most email is delivered promptly by gremlins, but gremlins are hungry and will eat a few bytes here and there.
They also leave waste in the form of spam.
So, I propose that we turn to gnomes to deliver the mail instead, as they are much cleaner, and can be satiated by attaching a file like 'Hamburger.txt'.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Every time you sign up for some mailing list or discussion group, create a new e-mail account or alias for just those mailings. Bam, it's automatically sorted out by itself with extreme ease. If you have limited bandwith (or are checking, say, on your palm) sometimes, just check your important addresses frequently, and reserve your mailing lists for a once-per-day check.
If some site asks for your e-mail address to download a piece of software, or to register, make up a new alias and give that to them. If you start getting tons of crap at that address, you can just remove that alias, and they get it all bounced back in their stupid spamming faces.
Give one address to your cow-orkers just for work stuff. Give a different one to your Mom and other techno-nots that blocks all attachments. Give another one to your friends with brains that goes unfiltered. For people you don't want to talk to, give them the address of an autoresponder tied to Eliza.
Be a *Happy Camper* and let your addresses be *Bubbles* and you be just *You*.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
there is no thing
what else could you want?
How about plain text, HTML, RTF, or PDF? Every person who's been on the internet longer than two months has Acrobat.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I used to know how to do this, but I forgot it as soon as I figured it out. Go figure...
What was I talking about?
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
Not to mention that a PDF would be 10x the size. I have no idea why Mac and Windows OS's are so baffled by postscript...half the printer drivers have to deal with it already, why not just bundle a damn interpreter with the OS and have a minimal frontend on it for screen viewing?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Damn you, Admiral Hopper! I've got a huge stack of COBOL listings on my desk that I've got to translate to, of all things, vbscript (damn you, Bill Gates!)
well, i tried to paste it in here but the lameness filter would not let me. try this.
I say could have because it got sucked down the drain in late 2000 with all of the companies that didn't have a damn thing to offer. Lesson #1: make sure your CEO gets along with your venture partner.
No, I'm not bitter. Much.
a nice methods paper, but mr. kleinberg doesn't use any of the free metadata that comes with email and news: to, from, subject.
i use outlook, and cluster my mail by sender... most of the time, that tells me pretty easily whether a given piece of mail is a work email, a personal email or a mailing list. from there, i check the subject line of work emails, just to confirm my categorization of work/humor/administrivia.
i'd want to see a comparison between a metadata-only method (rules and filters on the RFC 822 header) and mr. kleinberg's method before i'd consider using it.
It's more general than e-mail, but in the wearable computing community, there's a little application called Remembrance Agent, written by Bradley Rhodes that many folks use. In terms of stand-alone UI, it's still quite primitive, but that's because it was built around dynamic hooks into Emacs.
I've been playing around with some Java-based wrapper code, to wrap the ra-retrieve executable in a Server and allow clients to access the data via sockets. I have a Java-based client coded up that hooks into the System clipboard, but it's still in alpha-mode. All GPL'd of course, but needs a little time to mature. It's a proof-of-concept, work in progress. :-)
Check out Brad's site for more insight into the work he did and is doing.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Postscript has the best reproduction accuracy for the file size. Assuming it has any kind of figures or equations, the only other reasonable alternatives are dvi and pdf. I've never seen dvi files rendered in a decent amount of time, and pdf is too fat, esp. for a paper linked to by slashdot. :)
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
my $pr0n = "adult";
...
my $spam = "viagra";
my $urgent = "penis enlargement";
open (INBOX,/home/mail) or die "Damn! No fun for me:$!\n";
@list = readdir(INBOX);
foreach $ (@list) {
if (-f $spam) {
my $status = unlink($spam);
}
if (-f $pr0n) {
my @MUST_SEE = $pr0n;
next;
}
if (-f $viagra) {
my @RAINY_DAY = $viagra;
next;
}
}
# or something like that
OK, it's not a piece of Linux software, but it is a beautful idea:
http://www.creo.com/sixdegrees/
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Here is a PDF version.
Boy could I use the Karma!
Hoo boy. Here we go again. When are you kids going to get it straight?
- Choosing not to listen to somebody is *not* censorship.
- Throwing your mail away before you open it is *not* censorship.
- Choosing not to relay somebody's spam is *not* censorship.
- Choosing not to broadcast somebody's TV program, even if you own a TV network, is *not* censorship.
- Telling a movie producer you won't distribute his/her movie unless he/she makes cuts or changes to the subject matter is *not* censorship.
- Rallying your church group together to burn books is *not* censorship.
- Refusing to sell certain magazines or newspapers, if you own a newsstand, is *not* censorship.
The only way somebody can be truly "censored" is when there is no legal means for that person to get his/her speech/art/etc. produced and disseminated to the pubic. Generally speaking, the only body with that type of power is the government -- because they make the laws.
Everything else is merely an inconvenience. It may piss you off, sure, and you may wish things were different. But you can't force people to support you, encourage you, or fund you if they just don't want to. For example, people in this country (the US) *do* have a right to decide what material constitutes pornography, relative to their local community standards -- and if you don't like it, you are within your rights to move to another town.
"No censorship" does not mean being forced to look at every piece of crap that somebody wants to throw in your face, and god help us if it did.
Breakfast served all day!
Now I can automatically filter my barely-legal porn spam from my anime porn spam. Lets hear it for technology =)
Somewhat to my astonishment when I clicked on the link up popped a box asking me to confirm Postscript Renderer options! I had no idea that I had anything on this box that could read Postscript.
Some minutes of 100% CPU later up pops a PSP window, with the document rendered in a font about five pixels square. Fair enough, I suppose, for what's basically a photograph editing application.
But really, how bizarre, posting something in a low level printer file format. We'll have people posting documents in PCL5 next.
Actually, ghostscript created a PDF about half the size of the .ps file.
-rw-r--r-- 1 kz None 239121 Apr 24 14:13 bhs.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 kz None 433678 Apr 24 14:02 bhs.ps
Of course, the PDF is Flate encoded internally, and the ps is a big fluffy text file, so the ps file would compress to well below the PDF size.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
First, I sort out mail from the mailingslists I read.
Then, mail from friends, and people I correspond with a lot.
Finally, I have a weighted scoring recipe:
:0 Bh
* -199^0
#Assign an initial value of -199, mail gets filtered, if the score is above 0, at the end of the recipe.
* 50^1 ^(From|To):.*@hotmail.com
* 50^1 ^(From|To):.*@yahoo.com
* 50^1 ^(From|To):.*@aol.com
* 50^1 ^(From|To):.*@msn.com
* 50^1 ^(From|To):.*@excite.com
* 50^1 ^(From|To):.*@netscape.net
* 50^1 ^(From|To):.*@yahoo.co.uk
#Most mail to and from these domains is spam, so score it.
* 100^1 opt-out
* 50^1 opt-in
* 200^1 OTCBB
* 50^1 viagra
* 50^1 zyban
* 50^1 propecia
* 75^1 FREE
* 75^1 GUARANTEED
* 75^1 LEGAL
* 50^2 MILLIONAIRE
* 50^1 100%
#Words I only see in spam.
mail/Trash
This works quite well for me. If any spam gets through, I try to find some words, that I don't get in normal mail, and add them to the scoring.
/Styx
Message rules are very easy to set up and manage. No agents.
Spam filtering is one possible application of this type of tool, but the more useful involves taking the mail you *do* want, and sorting it into logical buckets. For instance, let's say work on several open source projects, belong to a couple organizations, and have a real-life job. You could toss a filter in your email that scans each incoming message and throws it in the proper bucket. This allows you to logically separate your mail to reduce confusion of each non-overlapping category.
:-)
Procmail only goes so far, it's really only useful for simple header scanning.. I could really see a good scanner utility being a valuable tool. Maybe Google should share some of their technology..
Josh Woodward
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillips cmb 181384 Apr 24 14:59 bhs.ps.gz
And the winner is...gzipped postscript, which needn't be ungzipped before viewing.
Alas, no. Adobe wanted ridiculous prices to license Display PostScript (DPS), the engine that NeXT used in the NEXTSTEP display system. (NeXT is a company. NEXTSTEP is an operating system.)
Given the ridiculous licensing prices, Apple went a different way and created Display PDF for Mac OS X's drawing system.
Ghostscript works just fine, but the lack of DPS is one of the reasons I still keep a NeXT cube on/under my desk.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Why are there so many people complaining about a PS link? The answer is simple: ./ is news for nerds, not for geeks.
So while the average geek keeps his favorite postscript viewer handy, the standart nerd wonders about such an ancient format and does not know how to feed his acrobat viewer with it...
Here is the solution for those irritated ones: try this piece of ancient software on the ancient adobe format, and you can miracously view it's contents!
Have fun and keep your google handy!
I have enjoyed using the VM module for Emacs. It allows sorting your entire Inbox into separate categorized mail boxes via regular expressions. Basically with one shift-A keystroke, my entire day's worth of mailing list stuff gets whisked away into a half-dozen different files. After this, I feel really sorry for people trapped in the Outlook dungeons!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
For those without postscript readers, a PDF version is available here.
Check out Enfish Onespace for those of you running MS Outlook. Not only does it do great text mining of all e-mails, it does the same with contacts and with files on your hard drive (the professional version handles network files, as well).
:)
It's got a clean UI, but it is a bit hard getting used to. I've found it to be a great tool for finding info in a snap - I just enter a search phrase and instantly get a list of relevant e-mails, Word docs, spreadsheets, contacts, and even websites.
And nope, I'm not associated with them in any way - I just like the product.
--
Welcome to the land of the easily amused...
I also use this technique for my externally hosted domain...I get all the mail addressed to any user in the domain, but its easy to set up mail client filters to remove those with are addressed To:, say, potentialspammer1@mydomain.
So, if there's any possibility of SPAM, I just invent a new user. Unfortunately, I didn't figure this out quite soon enough and I have some users which get spam and real mail, which I can't afford to filter to trash - people buying their own domains (come on, its like $15 a year) should be thinking ahead.
Also, its not as neat a set up as having my own POP server bounce back the message (which might mean you get off the spam list one day!). More importantly, filtering the To: field, doesn't help me most times, since spammers set the To: to "READTHIS" and use Bcc: for their spammies (is that a word!).
ALSO
Here's an unrelated question for anyone else who owns a domain like me, where they get a catch all POP box.
How do you guys make sure people USE your nice domain name?
In other words, its okay having a POP box, mail.mydomain.com, but you never seem to get offered the services of an SMTP server through which you can send your messages From: this nice address.
I would hazard that most people rely on Reply-To:, which is all very well, except that not all mail clients respect it, and you may want to entirely obscure the actual From:.
Of course, mail clients like Emacs and Mozilla make it easy to arbitrarily set your From:, however you then have to get this through whatever SMTP server you have available (and in order to block spammers and other pranksters, you will increasingly find that most will only send mail if the From: agrees with your user name).
One of the reasons I moved to linux was so I could run sendmail and not rely on other peoples SMTP servers. The is okay at work, since we have direct internet access, but from home when I dial up, it doesn't work.
I don't think my ISP likes to have people sending mail from their own computers, I get name resolution errors from sendmail when attempting to send email (but have no problem with DNS for web), so I think that perhaps the ISPs DNS servers refuse to give up MX records.
Anyone else in a similar boat?
Just use GhostView...
Here ya go, in PDF format: http://www.kevindustries.com/bhs.pdf
ps2pdf bhs.ps worked fine for me...
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
What is the difference between postscript and DPS? Any reason why DPS can't be integrated into X? The only effects of a DPDF renderer in OS X that I've seen are being able to view .pdf's without Acrobat and having vector-based widgets.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I've often thought it would be great if I could save my email to a mysql (or postgres, if you prefer) that would automatically parse the header and body into table fields. Then when you want to search it you can use SQL queries instead of the covoluted grep commands I use now.
Doesn't seem hard to write. Anybody know of such a thing?
"Perhaps even one of them Perl monkeys will quickly hack such a background tool."
Been done already. Check out Mail::Miner.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
NM, here is this project that seems to be just that. Apparently Display Ghostscript is dead, but DPS lives on. Still don't see what the big whoop is.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
My reaction was to want an e-mail reading program that didn't require any filter configuration, though I imagined it would do well to be given a few hints, such as who my boss is, who my mother is, and who my wife is. Other than that, let the program figure it out.
Imagine the canonical, old-fashioned secretary temp. She ('cause that's what the canonical version was) didn't have to know anything domain-specific to sort the morning mail. Magazines go together, bills go together, personal letters go together, etc.
I imagine an automated version for my e-mail. Look at who it is "to" (am I on the list?), look at who is "cc"-ed (am I on that list?), look at who it is from (my boss, wife, or mother?), look at who else it is to (boss, wife, or mother?), look at the thread it is part of (is it responding to something I previously wrote?), look at the content (does it mention me, things I have written, my boss, wife, or mother?). Was it sent to a mailing list? Was it written by someone I have explicitly written to (once or many times?)? Was it written by someone who has previously sent me direct e-mail (once or many times?)? Those ideas are just the obvious ones, think of others. Think of more. (Does it talk about sex, credit card merchant accounts, stock tips, or Nigerian money?)
Now take that and sort it by importance and similarity. Look for a way to present me in a descriptive summary, arranged in a hierarchy with a top-level of, say, 3 to 9 categories, a greatest depth no greater than, say, 4, and keep the sub-branching at intermediate nodes between 3 and 5--but don't max out all those dimensions at once, try to keep the total number of leaf categories to under, say, two dozen. Try to make more important items land higher in the tree and with few siblings, grouped with siblings of similar importance. (Maybe give an importance weight to each e-mail and balance the tree on that scale, that would float e-mails to me from my boss about my mother and wife really high with few siblings.)
This summary needs to be integrated with a complete index of the e-mail so I can see how a message fits into a larger thread, how it fits into previous e-mails.
I (the user) would need to tell the program when to make me a summary of my e-mail (e-mail reading is different when a lot comes in or just a little), and I want to be able to browse through old summaries, including deciding to see composite summaries or, say, the last several days, a week (or three), month, year, or 400 days.
So I think it ends up being a 4-part user interface:
List of summaries (which can be manipulated).
A given summary.
Exhaustive thread/date/subject/sender list (analogous to what every e-mail reader seems to have now). Note that this view could effectively be turned into an exhaustive address book. Frequent (favored) correspondents could be highlighted by me for ease in sending a new e-mail, and also to provide importance hints to the program. This is where I might say who my boss/wife/mother is.
A body of a (or more) specific e-mail being read, written, or old e-mail (sent or received) being reviewed.
And I could go on, but I won't. If anyone wants to write such a thing and wants to hear more, send me an, um, e-mail.
-kb, the Kent who has been saving all his e-mail (including spam!) for a year or so, providing plenty of raw material to test any such program.
Please check out:
http://homepage.mac.com/zoe_info/
Zoe is way ahead of this curve.
Phorecast downloads all your email into a database of your choosing; it is database abstracted using PHP's PEAR DB library.
.tsv translation file for any language you like. Version 0.5 (on the way) improves these functions, and adds a todo list as well.
Phorecast is a web application written in PHP that combines email, calendar, and address book functions. It is language abstracted, so you can write a
Full disclosure: I wrote it, and I use it as my primary email client.
Try out Phorecast, open-source email, calendar,
Well, the attentive reader would have noted that I pointed out that Adobe wanted a very high per-seat license. Apple wanted to pay a flat rate, IIRC, and the two companies didn't work it out. So Apple went a different way.
DPS was used in a more fundamental way in NEXTSTEP. It was really amazing. There was true WYSIWYG, as the code on the screen was what was literally sent to the printer. Layout was really improved as a result, and you could mix postscript code with your drawing program efforts and see it previewed in a live fashion on-screen. It was easy to save documents in a portable fashion (PS), and a dozen other things.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
This may also be a reverse DNS resolution problem. Check that your IP resolves to your hostname and that your hostname resolves to your IP. If not, some sendmail installations will reject your mail. Also, make sure your sendmail is sending out the correct hostname - eg, you can set up your machine so that it thinks its hostname is something.domain.com instead of some-long-crap-dsl-023-094.domain.com where something.domain.com is not an actual DNS record. This works fine for everything except when sendmail starts sending out emails claiming something.domain.com as originator.
Another thing you can do is configure sendmail to send all mail addressed to "user+any_arbitrary_string@domain.com" to "user@domain.com". This is useful since I don't have to do anything to generate a new email address. Search google.
I'll add that giving out a separate email addy for every company works beautifully. It also lets you know when some company sells your email address, something they will never admit to doing otherwise. I now get zero spam in my inbox.
The main result in Kleinberg's paper relates to finding NEW topics that start to appear in the stream. Let's say you already have categorization filters (procmail, keyword filters, your own set of folder hierarchies, whatever...), but there's a new topic that starts showing up in your mail, or in your newsgroup feed, or on CNN. Klienberg's result is a way to find that the new stuff really is NEW, and you might want to group it up together, and make a folder for it. You could do that automatically, or by hand, but first you have to know that there's a topic.
there's a bunch of other work in this area, what the NLP types call TDT -- "Topic Detection and Tracking"
Check out sneakemail.com - it does basically this, but at their domain name, and you can set filters of particular addresses, or just delete them. Very useful idea, I'd definitely be willing to pay for it though...
jzw of Mozilla/Netscape fame have a hypothetical program called Intertwingle which is (Score:5,Interesting) ....
RFC1925
There's been lots of work on auto-classifying email. I did my semester project in Machine Learning on this in 1999. It's a fairly simple study, but it seems like a Naive Bayesian classifier using word counts as features does a pretty decent job of classifying email, and does really well on spam.
The paper is here here.
J.
who the hell gets so much email they need to
mine for text, christ ??!! dont change your email filtering, change your pathetic life !!
there are plenty of other things far more worth mining than TEXT
As much as slashdotters hate lawyers...
And most politicians...
Maybe we should learn how to use them...
Use the laws in place. Sue them for the costs associated with spam. Sue them when they break the laws that exist to protect consumers. Whether it is spam, telemarketers, or Best Buys. Stiff it to them. Out smart them. After all, arent we geeks and nerds? By the world's definition arent we all supposed to be smarter, or a step above average person?
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Here
/cj
i'm taking a class with kleinberg right now and he's a great lecturer. if anyone is interested in algorithms of any kind, go read his papers.
Reminds me of the maps for the 3D network game for the Mac that Ambrosia made...Avara, I think? The maps were vector graphics, where different shapes meant different things and text inside the shapes was code. Very cool idea. I think there's still a lot of potential in the idea that source code doesn't necessarily need to be a simple linear text file.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Aha, is this why it works at work (where my hostname is correct and resolvable), but not at home with my ISP, where my hostname remains the same but could not be looked up?
I just dial of over a modem, and its possible I configured that kind of perculiarly, because of wanting to switch between the LAN at work and my dialup at home.
Haha, that is what I like to see. Some common sense once in a while.
Some other transgressions: the Mac OS has forced the Apple menu on its users for nearly 20 years. Why can't I have a 3rd party menu? And sure people could download an alternative to GNOME terminal, but realistically who will exert the effort? And why don't I have a choice of who provides me with a tea timer in KDE?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
There are plenty of e-mail mining tools in development. This particular work takes one particular approach to mining the data. Whether this approach will turn out to be useful remains to be seen.
this is perhaps the greatest example of slashdotter myopia ever. I don't give a crap about my karma, I just have to laugh at this AC:
It shouldn't take two months to get ghostscript and ghostview. In fact, it comes with most modern operating systems.
Clue time: 99% of people who've ever used a computer have never heard of either. If they click on the link above, they get a windows file box for "open with" and they wonder why the author didn't inlude a warning of what this strange file format was and what, exactly, they are supposed to do with this file.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/
This and other projects do what you're talking about but most are not in wide use.
I also have my own domain name but I'm limited to 5 forwarded email addresses. I wanted to do what you suggested a while ago but couldn't. Then I stumbled across Sneakemail and it basically did everything I had intended anyway.
In a nutshell, you sign up for an account, giving only a contact email address (I use spam AT threewordslong DOTTY com). Once logged in you can create a new, randomized email address for each new web service that needs an email address. If one of these services spams or sells your sneakemail address you: a) know exactly who did it and cease further business with them and b) can filter on that specific email address.
It's a great service and no, I don't work for them...
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
158213 Apr 19 09:41 bhs.ps.bz2
t.
There are several articles on /. concerning lawsuits against spammers.
i ng &op=stories&author=&topic=111§ion=&sort=1
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=sue+sued+su
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Qmail is good for this sort of thing. By default, a user receives everything at username-*@domain.com.
.qmail-amazon and .qmail-slashdot files in your home directory and have a .qmail catch-all.
So, I subscribe to amazon with username-amazon@domain.com, slashdot with username-slashdot@domain.com etc.
You can then control the delivery location of mails to these recipients using
This comes in handy for filing mailing-lists away, filtering out spam etc. Its also interesting to see who's sold you down the river to spammers, I recently started receiving spam to username-bsdtoday@domain.com... bastards!
Cheers,
Si
I could list it all here, but it's much more efficient to just point people at:
http://www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm
(Which is a site that everyone should read before doing UI stuff.)
Sample of one of the "best" bits:
Judging from the number of visitors who have mentioned it, the process of copying messages in Notes is perhaps its worst interface "feature". Apparently, when mail messages are copied from one folder to another, the message itself is not copied; Notes creates a "reference" to the message. Unbeknownst to the user, if you delete the reference, Notes will in turn delete the message itself. Similarly, deleting the message will cause all references to it to also be deleted.
I'd like to find something like this - where
as I browse across a web page I could active
a program that would look at the page, and suggest a series of folders that appear to be relevant.
If I agree, I click okay and go on. If I think a category is unnecessary, or missing, I would
have the option of adding a category.
I see this as a parallel need to the mining
of the email.
URL: http://xanga.com/lvirden > Quote: Saving the world before bedtime. Even if explicitly stated to the contrary, n
SWISH++ (my search engine) specifically knows to index mail/news files (including text, HTML, RTF, LaTeX files) and attachments of any of those (in quoted-printable or base64 encodings). It can also index any other kind of attachment via external filter programs. A procmail recipe for auto-splitting incoming mail is included in the distro. I also believe that my statement of SWISH++ being the fastest open-source indexer is accurate.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Yeah sure, embed it in the OS. More proof that any notion of what constitutes an "Operating System" has been completely destroyed by Microsoft's marketing department.
Dude, it's real simple. Install ghostview, set up as helper app in the browser of your choice for application/postscript.
Bundle with the OS. Feh!
SpamBouncer is a set of procmail recipes to filter spam.