Re: [Pan-users] Kill file

[Duncan]

arnuld posted on Mon, 27 Aug 2018 16:19:31 +0530 as excerpted:

> You can see one example here:
> http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/filters_ex1.html
> 
> [*] Score:: =-9999 Message-ID: googlegroups Message-ID: webtv
> 
> It will just ignore all posts from google/gmail (because that is from
> where 99% of spam comes. If I see someone spamming then I just
> right-click that post in pan and select "Edit Score" and choose  the
> options according to what I want to do.
> 
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 2:08 PM Dieter Britz
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> How does one set up a kill file in pan? Some of the ngs I frequent are
>> infested, and in one of them the sender seems to have a long-term email
>> address, so a kill file might work for a while.

@arnuld:

There's a reason why pan warns about top-posting.  Please post in 
standard quote/reply-in-context format.  It makes further replies in 
context /much/ simpler to do for the poster and to follow for the reader.

@ Dieter:

Despite the top-posting breach of protocol, arnuld's implication, that 
scoring is the way pan does kill (and watch) files, is correct.  In fact, 
the ignore/watch menu items simply add a scoring rule setting =-9999 (for 
ignore or =9999 (watch) rules based on the author header (ignore author) 
or the appropriate message-id in references header (ignore/watch thread).

What you then have pan do with those watched/ignored scores, or for that 
matter posts matching other scoring rules you may setup, is up to you.  
IIRC pan doesn't show posts matching -9999/ignored by default, but there 
are options for matching that and all the other scoring categories in the 
view > header pane menu, as well as whether only the matched articles 
themselves are shown, or whether the display includes the subthread or 
entire thread, as well.

You will, however, note that pan doesn't auto-mark ignored posts as read 
by default, or by default take other actions such as auto-deleting 
ignored or low-scoring or auto-caching/downloading high-scoring or 
watched posts.  However, these are options too, with setup available for 
them on the actions tab of the preferences dialog.  Also available are 
score-category-based color-coding options for the score column (if you 
have the scores column set to display of course).  These can be set along 
with the rest of pan's colors settings, on the colors tab of the 
preferences dialog.

So one possible setup would be to configure auto-deleting of ignored 
messages, auto-marking-read of low-scoring (under 0) messages, so you 
don't see them by default but they're still available if you want to read 
them (and they're not so bad as to be ignore-deleted), and auto-caching 
of high-scoring or watched articles.

Meanwhile, a couple additional points on scoring:

* While pan's menus and dialogs allow scoring on select headers, 
generally those normally found in the overviews file, by manually editing 
the scorefile it's possible to score any arbitrary header.  However, note 
that if the header isn't in the overview file pan fetches when it 
downloads headers, pan won't be able to actually score on it until the 
entire article is downloaded to pan's local cache.  This obviously isn't 
as efficient as being able to score from the overviews file before 
download-to-cache, but it can still be useful if it avoids having to 
manually deal with the article, read a troll or spam, etc.

* Briefly, pan's scorefile uses slrn's scorefile syntax, tho pan doesn't 
handle some of the advanced features, and last I checked, handled all 
scoring rules using OR logic -- the AND logic parsing was broken.  The 
big tip for manually editing the scorefile is that all lines beginning 
with the % character are comments and don't affect actual parsing at 
all.  Pan actually adds a lot of these, but they're for the human reader, 
not pan, and can be deleted if you are trying to consolidate.  Just ask 
if you want more info about the scorefile syntax and manual editing... or 
check the list archives as I've posted rather detailed instructions and 
examples quite a few times over the years.

* The one thing that pan's scoring doesn't allow, that I wish it did, is 
score on key words or phrases in the body, the sig, or in the entire 
post, headers and body.  Of course that too would require downloading-to-
cache in ordered for that scoring to take effect, but it'd sure be a nice 
feature when trying to avoid nymshifting trolls/spammers that still tend 
to use specific off-topic keywords in their message bodies (including 
sigs).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman