jmtd → linux → mail → filtering
This page was imported from my old site and is yet to be reviewed.
So assuming you have a spam filter and you end up with some mail in a "filtered" box which you want to hand-check before deleting. I've found that there are a few things you can do which really speed this process up.
If your mailer lets you customize it's settings on a per-folder basis, then take advantage of this. Reading through a mailbox of filtered mail is a totally different activity to reading normal mail.
- bind a convenience key
- I keep hand-classified spam in a folder for stats purposes. Bind a key (in my case, 'S') to the save operation you need. You might also want to turn off wait_key to make the process quicker.
- sort by subject
- I enjoy having my normal mail threaded together and sorted by ascending date, where a thread's date is defined as being the date of the last post to it. However, this isn't an efficient way to handle spam. I suggest ordering by subject. You will find that you get a run of a hundred or so spams with exactly the same subject, which you can glance at and disregard.
- scrolling
- mutt's default setting seems to be to scroll through mail one by one. Turn this off when handling spam. You want to see a screen's worth of mail, classify it, hit the requisite number of 'S' keys, and be presented with the next batch, not one at a time.