Re: Killfile: Was all sorts of rants and ramblings regarding free speech, rants, mo

On Mon, 29 Apr 2002 12:23:04 -0700, "Brian Bilderback"
<bbilderback@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Ok, for those of us still in the computer dark ages, will someone
explain to 
>me what a killfile is and how to use it?

A killfile (or twit list, as it's sometimes called) is a Net name for a
specific form of e-mail filter. 

An e-mail filter allows you to do things with messages based on specific
criteria. My e-mailer/Usenet reader is called Agent. I filter all my
e-mail
with it. For instance, anything with a "To" address of
gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
(and several other permutations) goes into a folder called "GZG Mailing
List".
So, my mailing list stuff gets segregated from e-mail addressed to me
personally, and from the stuff going to the Playtest List, etc. I don't
have
to do this manually, it does it at the moment the program downloads
e-mail
from my ISP.

All good e-mail programs allow this, with varying levels of ability.
Even
Microsoft Outlook allows it. For that matter, Hotmail has filtering too
but
it's often looking at just the name of the person who e-mailed you. It
doesn't
have the ability to kill whole threads.

Agent allows me to set various levels of filtering, and filter on a
whole
bunch of different things, including items from the header that you
might not
usually see in your e-mail messages. It also lets me put expiry dates on
a
filter. I can rank my filters. Anything not directly addressed to me
goes into
a "held" folder, but only after it fails to get caught on the GZG
Mailing List
filter and the GZG Playtest List filter.

"Killfile" is the net name given to the filter used to for people and
threads
that you really don't want to read. Most folks set up a filter for
people they
don't like that throws those messages straight into their trash folder
(or
deletes them immediately). Some don't like doing that. Instead, they put
it
into a "held" folder where they can manually delete the messages. Either
way,
if someone bugs you enough that you don't want to see their posts ever
again,
you add them to the "delete immediately without downloading from the
Mail
Server" filter, known colloquially as a "killfile".

Oh, and the standard way of telling someone you have killfiled them is
to send
them a message with the term "*plonk*" in it. That's the sound of them
hitting
the bottom of your "kill file". As in, "Welcome to my kill file, twit.
*plonk*"

I hope this explains it to you... E-mail me off list if you have any
other
questions about Killfiles.

Allan Goodall		       agoodall@hyperbear.com
http://www.hyperbear.com

"At long last, the earthy soil of the typical, 
unimaginable mortician was revealed!"