On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:27:10 +0100, JeroenK wrote:

Al Arduengo schreef:

Don't give up. I make good use of my filtering system. If you use a
decent newsreader (Thunderbird is "ok"), you can keep yourself from ever
seeing 80% of the crap, while not missing 99% of the worthwhile stuff.

I'm using SpamPal for my regular email filtering, as I found
Thunderbirds' heuristic system giving me too many false positives. I'm
unaware though if SpamPal can be used for Usenet also.

I think it would be hard to shift the worthwhile posts from these
threads from the useful ones though. Same posters, normal English, etc.
Although I'm sure it will help with the spam.

If you need help with the filter set up, let me know. I would be glad to
assist.


I have been unable to find a setting for newsgroups only filtering.
Closest I found was "local folders". Otherwise I'm using separate
accounts for all my email accounts, so "local folders" is completely idle.

Unfortunately Thunderbird (aka Mozilla mail, Netscape mail) do not
offer very sophisticated USENET capabilities. Regular expressions are
your friend. My filters look for lots of specific words in the
subject, certain authors, and cross posting. In regexp form, a
subject and author search would be perhaps:

if subject contains "terror|bush|clinton|iraq|MI5", set score = -9999,
never expire

if author contains "hd radio|cuhulin", set score = -9999, never expire

Sure, this might filter out a rare post about Iraq radio, or some such
thing, but most of the time, it works well.

You get the idea. If you use windows, I might suggest Gravity or Pan.
Pan is my reader of choice in Linux and Windows.

Cheers.
-Al



If you have any tips, they're welcome! I wonder though how useful it is
as some of the posters in these flamewars also make useful posts in the
same type of English. I'm really curious whether heuristics will help
there... But I love to be proven wrong on this one