[Gllug] [OT] What's with all the messy posts.

[Victor Churchill]

On 5 October 2010 14:47, Jan Henkins <jan at henkins.za.net> wrote:
> Gentlemen,
>
> Now that we've flung the book at each other a few times, let's move on,
> shall we? This thread is becoming really unfriendly, unnecessarily so.
>

My apologies; I was one of those whose reply was a bit sarcastic and
could have been construed as unfriendly although I didn't intend that.

Regarding the original question of how to filter out poorly formatted
emails, I suspect that that is quite a Big Problem. I started looking
at doing a vaguely related task in Perl a while ago, to screen
LogWatch messages from servers and archive the ones that did not
contain cause for concern; eventually I shelved the task as it is
quite hard to formalise (to the regexp/algorithmic level) what
constitutes good vs bad information. And that is looking at machine
generated messages!

I guess one could automatically screen any msg that ends with 'Sent
from my $MANUFACTURER mobile device"; also it is no doubt tractable
(though less trivial) to detect top posting (though automatically
deleting them seems a bit harsh ;-). Beyond that is sounds like it
could be very hard to describe exactly what one wants to reject.

-- 
regards,

Victor Churchill
The Software Shack, Ltd
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