Thunderbird, blocking cross posts

[John Rumm]

Just in case anyone else is tired of wading through the irrelevant cross posted stuff, here is a method for blocking cross posts in Thunderbird:

(you can block specific groups or all cross posted messages)

[Cynic]

Thanks John. Very useful

[Brian Gaff]

Or you can I think use certain servers. The problem is that if, say, its from ES and you are on one in the same chain, then it seems to allow them into albersani, but you try to post a reply and it won't let you, witch seems illogical to me. It should remove the crosspost as they come in from the backbone, not just the user. Brian

[Adrian Caspersz]

Try it (yes, it works), but I did find that you have to drop and resubscribe for Thunderbird to take notice of the filter, once created. Though that could be my Thunderbird is borked.

(So I've just reset uk.d-i-y, and lost a good lot of past threads.. so don't do the above lightly)

[Martin Brown]

It doesn't apply to existing posts on a newsgroup (at least for me) but it does kill any new posts that trigger the kill rule.

The other thing to watch is ticking "Match any of the following" is essential.

Targetting User-agent as well decreases the risk of false positives.

I miss wild cards on Thunderbird filters :(

[John Rumm]

Yup, if you want it to work on posts already downloaded then select the filter in the list on the filters dialogue, and click the "Run Now" button. That will make it go and re-check all the existing messages. (note it may take a little time to run if you have large numbers of messages cached).

Yup good point, I have changed the graphic in the article to highlight those bits.

[John Rumm]

You should be able to specify how many past headers to download. Only problem you might have is if your newsreader only has a limited archive of them (although most seem to have years worth of text only groups these days)

[RJH]

Thanks, handy.

[nothanks]

Thanks John. I don't get much crap (I presume individual.net deletes it, and filtering on a few strings dealt with much of what did get through) but I hadn't realised that it was possible to kill all cross-posts - that's very useful. As a (relatively) sane person it's very hard to understand the mentality of the morons who post rubbish and spoilers.

[AlexK]

Yes it does with most of the real spam.

Its basically all they have in their pathetic excuses for 'lives' with the worst of them like the Peeler.

[Andy Burns]

Just a word of warning, I wondered why I had kill-filed myself, it turns out by following John's example too closely and blocking posts to "uk.legal" you will also block "uk.legal.moderated" ... explains why I though it'd gone a bit quiet over there.

[Andy Burns]

I suppose blocking on "uk.legal," will catch some of them, without blocking the moderated group.

Probably a better method would be to have a filter match on ".moderated" in the group list and an action of "stop filter execution" that hits before the one that blocks on your chosen list of kook groups.

[Spike]

You could try adding to the filter a line with newsgroups > does not contain > uk.legal.moderated

and change the condition to match all of the following

[Andy Burns]

But then I can't have a list of several "bad" groups because the ALL condition will never fire.

[Tele Tubby]

All this schite is way too f****ng complicated to f*ck with, you two assholes.

[Spike]

Ah, sorry, I thought you might be using the 'comma' method.

[Anyhole Willdue]

Give it up, you limey cocksuckers. Americans win again. LOL

[Martin Brown]

You also need ", uk.legal" to handle both sequences.

Newsgroups contains ", " will kill every cross posting.

Killing on cross posted to "alt." by using a clause:

Newsgroups includes "alt." is pretty effective and safer.

There is very little of value in the "alt." hierarchy.

Again a slight risk of collateral damage if you are interested in eg.

soc.salt.treaty rec.malt.beers

Fictitious groups invented for illustration but I bet there are false positives on such a short target string in that long list of groups.

[Andy Burns]

I deliberately only suggested trailing comma rather than leading comma as well because that would block uk.legal.moderated again

which isn't what I want, just groups that the trolls xpost to.

[Roger Hayter]

I don't see why, ulm doesn't accept any cross-posted messages.