Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!itivax!vax3!scs
From: scs@vax3.iti.org (Steve Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: New Save Feature Request
Summary: Save by mailing list target
Message-ID: <1144@itivax.iti.org>
Date: 11 May 89 14:48:24 GMT
Sender: news@itivax.iti.org
Reply-To: scs@vax3.iti.org (Steve Simmons)
Organization: Industrial Technology Institute
Lines: 33


Just thought of something neat I'd like elm to do.  I get a lot of
mail from mailing lists -- sun-nets, bind, elm, etc.  This sort of
mail I file by mailing list, not sender.  I'd like an elm feature
that would, for some pattern I explicitly select, make the name of
save folder be changed to something else.

Once opening up this potential Pandora's box, there are lots of things
once could do for this feature.  For example:

  o  Define a list of users like 'bob fred joe jim' so that all mail
     from them uses a common folder 'cs_101_students'.

  o  Handle name conflicts so that john@kodak.com gets filed to 'john_hall'
     while john@itivax.iti.org gets filed to 'john_sauter'.

  o  Define mailing lists so that "To: bind-request" gets saved to
     "=mailing_list/bind" (yes, I use subdirectories within my mailbox)

Why not do this with filter?  One could, but filter handles the mail
*before* you read it.  I'd like this to handle it *as you save*.  Maybe
a 'save thru filter' function could do this, I dunno.  Plus filter is
not as powerful as I'd like to see.  I've looked extensively at the
code, and have concluded a complete parser rewrite (to yacc or bison
based) is needed.

Anyway, this looks like a *far* future feature.  I'd be interested in
what other folks think of it.
mail

   Steve Simmons         Just another midwestern boy
   scs@vax3.iti.org  -- or -- ...!sharkey!itivax!scs
         "Hey...you *can* get here from here!"