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List:       majordomo-workers
Subject:    Re: Minimum Length?
From:       Tom Neff <tneff () panix ! com>
Date:       1998-01-15 15:01:22
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At 07:08 AM 1/15/98 -0600, Gene Rackow wrote:
>One thing that has been done on a couple of lists that I've found
>extremely useful in cutting down on the "me-to" problem is to make the
>list ONLY recognize mail that is addressed to it on the "To:" line.

I do not understand how this addresses "me-to" postings: we get lots of
them with the list name very nicely in the To: hole, and tons of quoted
text in the body followed by one or two original lines.

Even people who address both the individual poster and the list seem
equally likely to do the list in Cc: or To:.

What I would do is this:
 * Have a parameter that defines what quoted lines look like.  It could be
a V8 regular expression suitable for direct testing:

    quoted_line_markers = (^\s*>|^\s*\||^\s*:)

 * Have another parameter that says what percentage of body lines are
permitted to look like quoted lines, according to the quoted_line_markers RE:

    quoted_max_percentage = 50

Then if a message exceeded the desired percentage, it would be bounced to
the moderator for approval like anything else.

Because this might be an expensive test to perform, leaving either
parameter blank would skip the check altogether.

The test itself might be done by counting matches of the marker RE on the
body using the 'm' modifier, times 100 over the number of matches of \n
with the 's' modifier.  Split and grep would do it too, but the memory
costs are very high.
-- 
Tom Neff <tneff@panix.com>

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