as the linux kernel mailing list is really noisy, I want to discard all mails which are send to my mailbox from the LKML, but which are not from me, to me or as answer to one of my mails. I do already do some filtering and redirect all patch-mails (including [PATCH at the beginning of the subject) to another inbox as the "normal" LKML mails. But it is still much too much.
How to do this with procmail?
What I have atm:
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* ^Sender:\ linux-kernel-owner@vger\.kernel\.org
* (PATCH|patch)
$MAILDIR/ml.kernel_org.linux-kernel.patches/
The real challenge here is to articulate how to reliably identify messages which are replies to something you wrote. Are you satisfied with excluding messages which are To: or Cc: yourself?
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* ^Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger\.kernel\.org\>
* ! ^From: Your Self <you@example\.net>
* ! ^TO_you@example\.net\>
/dev/null
(obviously, edit the addresses to match what your mail client really puts there).
Or perhaps you have a vanity domain, in which case (properly constructed) replies will have an easily identifiable Message-Id of yours at the start of References:?
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* ^Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger\.kernel\.org\>
* ! ^From: Your Self <you@example\.net>
* ! ^TO_you@example\.net\>
* ! ^References:[ ]*<[^<>@]*@yourdomain\.example\.net>
/dev/null
(the whitespace inside the square brackets should be a tab and a space).
Or you could expand that a bit to look for your domain anywhere in References:, to also include replies to replies to yourself, if you want that.
Or you could keep a local copy of all your outgoing message-id:s and look for them in References:, but that is already a significant endeavor which I will only point out as a possibility if you cannot use any of the above. (I do believe it has been hashed out in more detail before, perhaps on the Procmail mailing list.)
As an aside, I would change the "patch" rule to only examine the Subject: line. A match on "patch" in any other header is extremely likely to be a false positive. If you want to examine the body, you need extra flags, perhaps like this:
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* ^Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger\.kernel\.org\>
{
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* ! B ?? \<patch\>
* ! ^Subject:(.*\<)?patch\>
{ } # empty "then", just so we can continue to "else"
:0E
$MAILDIR/ml.kernel_org.linux-kernel.patches/
# While we are inside these braces, let's continue with other LKML stuff
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* ! ^From: Your Self <you@example\.net>
* ! ^TO_you@example\.net
/dev/null
# Any additional LKML recipes? Add them here
# Anything which falls through here is regular LKML
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$MAILDIR/ml.kernel_org.linux-kernel/
}
(This can obviously be refactored in a number of different ways. Remember De Morgan's laws: NOT (A OR B)<=> NOT A AND NOT B.)
As a safety measure, you might want to look for messages which actually carry a patch as an attachment, rather than filter the discussion about such messages? That can also become quite complex, because there is a number of different ways to represent a patch as a MIME attachment (and some are also sent completely in-line, in a regular text/plain part amongst other text) but that isn't insurmountable, either, just significant drudgery.