Re: Split mail on two headers

[Colin Rafferty <craffert@ml.com>]

Harry Putnam writes:

> Probably should be using 'fancy-splitting' but have tried to read it
> several times, and it is just to complicated for my level of
> experience. (A 'correct'  way of saying: I couldn't make heads or tails
> of it)

For getting started with fancy splitting, just start it at one simple
level to do your basic splitting.  Then add fancy stuff as you need it 
later.

> I want to see a regexp capable of splitting a message on both 'From' and
> 'To' headers.  In other words some way to match on more than one line.

You cannot do this in basic or fancy splitting.  Everything is just
one line at a time.

> Something like this seems it should work to split Joes' mail to me into
> 'Box' and let his mail to <whatever> go in a different direction, but
> does not.

> ("Box" "From:.*Joe Blow\\(.\\|\n\\)*To:.*reader")

This is one of my fancy mail splitting rules that does something
similar to what you want:

	    (from mail
		  (| ("\\(resent-\\)?\\(to\\|cc\\)" "craffert" "mail.daemon")
		     "mail.auto.spam"))

`from' and `mail' are predefined regexp's that match the "From:" field 
and the mailer-daemon sender, respectively.

If a message is "from" "mail", then I do a subsplit.  If it is
actually "to" me, I want it in "mail.daemon".  If it is not to me, it
is probably spam, so put it in the spam box.

Your version may look like this:

	    (from "Joe_Blow"
		  (| ("\\(resent-\\)?\\(to\\|cc\\)" "reader" "Box")
		     "Different.Box"))

> So can it be made to match on more than one line in the 'head'?

No.  You could write your own split function to do that, but it might
be more work than you need.

> Or, even more complicated, can it be made to match on a string in the
> body? (might be fun to play with)

No.  You cannot even write a split function that does this, since the
split is called narrowed to the header.

-- 
Colin