Help to kill file with Mozilla Thunderbird please

[Broadback]

I wish to kill file a specific poster on u.d-i-y. I cannot find his email address, how can I do it please? I do now particularly wish to name the individual as I am sure he will flame me.

[alan_m]

Highlight the from address RIGHT click and select the "Filter on" option The rest should be obvious

[Martin Brown]

Right click on the "From" field at the top of the headers and then use "Create Filter From"

It may be that they post through some anonymiser or with a forged From address in which case you may have to accept some collateral damage.

[Terry Casey]

It might help if you told us which newsreader you are using.

I have no trouble finding email addresses using the MicroPlanet Gravity newsreader but I don't need it to killfile someone.

I just right click within the body of the text and select 'Add to Bozo Bin' (which is what Gravity calls its Killfile).

Doesn't your newsreader have a similar facility?

[Jeff Layman]

You need to set up a message filter. I use Linux, and I can find "Message Filters" under "Tools"; I see you use Windows, so it might be under something else.

Firstly, click on the message of the poster you want to killfile. Then press "Ctrl-U" (the control and U keys at the same time). This will display the source information for that post. For example, the first few lines of yours shows:

Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Broadback [e-mail]>

Newsgroups: uk.d-i-y Subject: Help to kill file with Mozilla Thunderbird please

The "From" field is what you are after. Open "Message Filters". It should show "Filters for uk.d-i-y. Click on "New". Give the new filter a name (maybe the poster's name). The "Apply filter when" should have "Manually run" and "Getting new mail" checked. Then change the radio button to "Match any of the following". Next go to the drop down field which shows "Subject", and change it to "From". Next check the options shown for "contains". You may want to change it to something else. Suppose your poster always uses xxxjohnxxxxx as his posting name , where xxx can be anything or any length, but "john" always appears. So all you need is "contains" and type "john" (without the quote marks!) in the field. But beware! this will kill all messages from anyone where "john" appears in their "from" info. You can change it to something else more specific (for example, "Match all of the following").

You can add another condition by clicking on the "+" at the end of the row. Maybe your poster always starts his subject with "load of rubbish", so you can use that as a "Subject" "contains" condition.

You can then choose what to do if the condition(s) are met, by completing the "Perform these actions" requirements. That's all there is to it; don't forget to check that the filter has been enabled.

Remember, though, that these annoying posters often change their names ("nym shifting"), so you will need to review the filter conditions regularly.

[John Rumm]

There are a number of ways to make the filter, and also a number of things you can have it do. What will work best will depend on how you need to identify them, and also what kind of removal you want:

So from address is a good thing to kill on, but so can be the "organisation" header.

The action can range from simply marking their posts as "read", to deleting them, killing the post and any sub thread, to killing the whole thread.

If he is in your kill file by then, do you care? :-)

Drop me a personal email if you want specific advice.

[Jethro_uk]

Surely a dab of "AI", and the OP could have a trained filter that's as good as human doing the job ?

Or shall I add that to the growing list of things that "AI" *can't* do ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

ROFLMAO!

[John Rumm]

Blocking all anonymous remailers is a fairly easy fix for that, there can't be many legitimate uses for them on a group like this. It also has a side benefit of getting rid of a number of the more prolific religious nutters who prattle on about their karsies.

[John Rumm]

Was there not clue enough in the tile of the message?

[dennis]

in windows you double click the message and it opens in a window.

then you click on the from address to select it

then right click and select create filter

fill in the fields as you want

and puff of smoke I've gone.

[Martin Brown]

How is the AI supposed to guess which posters offend the OP?

AI can do lots of things but mind reading isn't one of them. (at least not unless you have a cranial interface)

Not a consumer item as yet...

[Brian Gaff]

Can it see the header? All one can do is to kill on what it says in from. Since many of the idiots post from Google there is no other easy way, you just add the new idiot name.

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

One thing I would say is ignore the flames they are no more than electrons after all. Many of us have been here for years, indeed since the last century, and you just develop a thick skin or sometimes mischievously play with them. Innocent smile. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Well there is a name for those, its starts with a b. its used in spam filtering a lot by isps. Brian

[John Rumm]

Bayesian filtering... its also used by the internal spam filter in thunderbird... So each time you mark or unmark an email as spam it learns what you think of as spam.

[Martin Brown]

Bayesian statistics are frequently used to kill spam based on certain heuristics and keywords present in your spam folder. It improves if you train it. Thunderbird by default only has rule based filters.

You can add new header keywords but you cannot AFAIK filter on content. The other main annoyance is a lack of wildcard matching (and a default of match all of the above rules which catches me out from time to time).

[Jethro_uk]

Like all "AI" it's just clever and fast pattern matching. I doubt it could even work out to write it's name on an IQ test, suggest the "I" bit is overblown, to say the least.

[alan_m]

Also used in Pegasus Mail Just drop a few offending emails into the spam folder and it starts learning to automatically filter future occurrences. If you find that it is incorrectly filtering similar emails just drag them out of the spam folder and the learning process learns not to filter them. I find that it works very well.

[Terry Casey]

Oops!

I obviously just clicked next post and read the message, which is displayed in nice bold type, and didn't notice the header, (which is not so clear) probably because I've broken my glasses so it's not fantastically clear!