Need help with Outlook newsreader rules

I'm fed up with much of the junk on this newsgroup. I think a lot of the stuff I have no interest in is cross posted from misc.survivalism. Is there any way in the Outlook newsreader to set up a rule that if a posting is also posted in that group it'll be marked "read"? I can live with some of this stuff, but it's getting ridiculous. I don't want to exclude some of the offenders directly. I like some of what Gunner, for example, posts, but a lot of it is of no interest whatsoever, and takes considerable time to wade through.

-- Bob (Chief Pilot, White Knuckle Airways)

I don't have to like Bush and Cheney (Or Kerry, for that matter) to love America

Reply to
Bob Chilcoat
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Break away from OE... It may be tough at first but well worth it in the long run. Real newsreaders will support scoring, which will allow you to have a lot of control over the messages. Xnews is free and amazingly flexible.

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Reply to
sittingduck

--Switch to shell access; use tin or something similar and start practicing writing killfiles. Heh.

Reply to
steamer

I don't know about Outlook Express (as I never use a Windows box for either news or e-mail, but blocking on cross-posting definitely helps a lot. Here is part of my scores file for the newsgroup using strn (a unix software package) as a newsreader:

====================================================================== killthreshold -50

-25 pattern newsgroups: .*,.*

-25 pattern newsgroups: .*,.*,.*

-25 pattern newsgroups: .*,.*,.*,.*

[ ... ]

+40 pattern subject: .*f/a.*

+40 pattern subject: .*f/s.* +40 pattern subject: .*fa.* +40 pattern subject: .*for sale.* +40 pattern subject: .*fs.* ======================================================================

Lots snipped out. But the first line says that if any article gets a score over a -50, it is "killed" (marked as already read).

To cross-post, you must have a comma in the "Newsgroups: " header for each newsgroup beyond the first. So, the first line sets the score to -25 if there is at least one comma (two newsgroups). The second line, adds another -25 if there is a second comma (three newsgroups), and the third line, yet another -25 if there are a total of four newsgroups in the header. Without anything else, three newsgroups are enough to reach the block threshold, but in addition there are rules which give a positive bias to the score, so (from the shown rules above), any of the variations above of for-auction or for-sale get the scores lowered enough to make it below the kill threshold. (They also get presented to me before other articles, as they are most likely to be time-sensitive.

The character '.' matches any character, and adding a '*' matches any number of the preceding, so ".*" allows any string before and after the explicit string being checked for. (Standard unix REs (Regular Expressions) used for pattern matching.)

One interesting artifact of this is that I will see a followup if someone has dropped the cross-posting, so I suddenly see a thread-map showing a large number of articles which I have never seen before, but marked as read. :-)

You might check whether OE allows any kind of pattern matching and scoring -- though I have my doubts.

I also put directly into the killfile (a separate file from the scorefile) specific "Subject: " headers which have gone political.

The advice that you get a (unix) shell account and use a unix based newsreader is a good one.

I understand that Forte's "Agent" offers pretty good filtering capabilities, and it *is* a Windows program, so it might do for you.

In any case, you will need to learn a bit about whichever filtering system you pick up, to learn how to best use it.

Good Luck, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

I heard that there is a news group for OE from the Agent NG. I've yet to get my OE mail into Forte Agent. Are you stuck with OE like I am with this cable company?

Reply to
Sunworshipper

Might try subscribing to MS and AMC temporarily and creating a rule which marks posts on there as read. Dunno if it'll keep that when you remove said newsgroups from the listing, though.

Tim

-- "I've got more trophies than Wayne Gretsky and the Pope combined!" - Homer Simpson Website @

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Reply to
Tim Williams

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