Sylpheed-claws killfile

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005

I read a couple of newsgroups using Sylpheed-claws, but sometimes there are annoying trolls that irritate me to no end. I’ve often spent a couple of minutes finding out if sylpheed had a killfile. A killfile is file with a bunch of (regular expression) rules that are applied to messages in newsgroups. You can use it to automatically delete/hide/etc messages.

So far I didn’t have any luck with killfiling in Sylpheed. Of course sylpheed has filters, but those didn’t work on newsgroups. Or at least the ‘hide’ action didn’t work.

Today I finally found out the correct way to killfile cross-posts in newsgroups. Trolls often cross-post to different newsgroups to maximize the annoyance. To automatically hide cross-posts in Sylpheed, you don’t use a real killfile. Instead, do the following:

• Create a new processing rule.
• For the Condition, enter

  header "Newsgroups" regexpcase ","

• Set the Action to

  hide

Next time you enter the newsgroup folder, cross-posts will automatically be removed.

Sylpheed-claws really needs better documentation by the way. It was quite hard to find out how the processing rules worked. First I tried to filter on the ‘Newsgroups’ matchtype, but this was incorrect apparently. I had to filter on the ‘Header’ matchtype with a Header name value of ‘Newsgroups’. Counterintuitive if you ask me.