Mail Filtering

Eric Hodel | Fri, 28 Apr 2006 20:53:22 GMT

Posted in ,

I’ve been using IMAPCleanse to clean out my list inboxes and have discovered that I get about 500 emails a day from mailing lists. I read no more than ten to twenty mails out of all those, and respond to maybe two of the mails I’ve read.

I want a bayesian filter for my mail that tells me what to read. Priming the filter with interesting mail is going to take time, so to accelerate that I have this list:

  • Messages I respond to are interesting to me
  • Messages I write are interesting to me
  • Responses to those messages are interesting to me
  • If I unflag an automatically flagged list it should never be re-flagged

I think the next tool I’m going to write is a tool that flags messages I write, messages I’ve responded to and responses to mails I’ve written. This should be easy to figure out from the \Answered flag, so I won’t have to do too much searching for In-Reply-To and References headers. I should also be able to keep track of auto-flagged messages with IMAP keywords.

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That sounds great, the same is happening to me with my blog feeds… That’s an interesting approach, in blogs the algorithms could be enhanced by tag, but their use is not required or common. Mails lack metadata :-(

Aníbal Rojas said about 16 hours later

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