Need help with Outlook newsreader rules

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.

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

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.*

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.

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?

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 @