Plonking in Thunderbird

[Invisible Man]

I use thunderbird for NGs and RSS

The only way of plonking the idiot children that are turning up here appears to be by filter.

Anyone know of any easier way?

[Andy Burns]

You can hit "K" or 'k' to kill entire threads, or subthreads, but for persistent offenders a filter is the only way, you can fit several "from:" addresses into a single filter though ...

[brass monkey]

You could always not read them, simples. The traffic is high enough in here that they only produce a slight background hum.

[The Natural Philosopher]

no. be glad to.

[John Rumm]

Short of manually killing on site (K or k), a filter to "ignore sub threads" is the easy way.

You can have multiple lines in a filter if you want - with "OR" operations (i.e. "Match any of the following") between each line. That's good for ignoring known pointless posters.

Sometimes you need individual filters to block posters who are spoofing real posters addresses - then you typically have a two line filter to match senders ID "contains" AND some other header line to "qualify" the filter. So say for example a troll were using you posting ID, then we could write a filter to kill the sub thread when the "From" "Contains" "some part of your ID" AND then a second line that implements a custom header filter to match when the "Injection-Info:" header inserted by your usenet provider "Doesn't contain" "eternal-september.org".

Typing Ctrl+U on a message to view the original text including all the headers, usually makes it easy to see what details you can filter on.

(one slight wrinkle with killing sub threads to watch fro by the way, is that if you use the View menu option "Threads->Watched threads with unread", to just show threads you are watching[1], it will still highlight the thread as having new messages even when the new ones are hidden in a killed sub thread. (however, pushing "n" to skip to next unread will just jump to the next real message you want to see).

[1] I have a filter to set any thread I post to as "watched" (and highlight my own posts in a different colour). That makes it easy to keep track of replies to conversations even when they are to older threads and might otherwise be missed.

[Peter B]

That sounds useful - how's it done?

[NoSpam]

When each prat first appears I send a note to the news server people and to abuse@wherever_they_come_from - 'no idea if it does any good but it makes me feel better. Maybe if everyone did the same it would help.

The mention of a sub-thread filter made me upgrade to the latest version of Thunderbird - fantastic! Now all the sad little retards can witter-on in their dreary little worlds and nobody will hear them.

Dave

[John Rumm]

Yup, often worth doing - some will take note after a few complaints if they have a way of blocking an account. With posts from google groups, they usually get tagged with the posters IP address as well. You can use that to look up their ISP and send an abuse report to them as well.

Indeed!

[John Rumm]

Create a filter called "Me" for example. Set it to match "From" "Contains" and put what you use as your usenet name or email address in the last box - so "Peter B" would do in your case. Then in the actions box set the first to "Tag Message" and "Personal", and then click the "+" to add another action, and set that to "Watch Thread".

That will highlight all your posts in Green, and place an "eye" icon beside them. You can then use the Threads entry on the view menu to swap between viewing "all" and "watched with unread".

(you can create similar filters to match other posters if you want, and tag them in other colours - so ones you enjoy reading can be found quickly. Or you can create "soft" kills, by say recognising a poster and setting their messages to "read" automatically. That means you can still see them, but TB skips over them when you hit N since it thinks they are already read).

[Roger Mills]

My watched threads don't turn green, and I can't see any way in the Filters dialogue of specifying colours for other messages. Am I missing something? [I am using version 3.0.10]

[Peter B]

Excellent stuff - thanks John

[John Rumm]

Watching alone won't colour a post (watching also applies to the whole thread not just that particular post).

To apply colours to posts, set an action to "Tag Message" and then a choice of tag (important, work, personal, to do and ignore are the default tags). Each has a (configurable) colour associated. It has the same effect as using the number keys to manually tag a message.

Note a filter can have multiple actions assigned to perform in the same was as it can have multiple match criteria.

I have added to pictures here to help explain:

[Roger Mills]

Many thanks - I've now done the same.

[dennis]

I am surprised that you grass on people. Especially when they don't actually do anything other than annoy you with posts you don't like. You appear to frown on people grassing on people that actually do illegal things.

[John Rumm]

They consume the computer resources, bandwidth, and more importantly time of a large number of people. This causes a significant and tangible monetary loss.

I think you will find that there are laws against computer misuse, and against sending malicious communications.

[dennis]

But in which country?

[John Rumm]

Here and in the US, plus a good number of others...