François Marier has recently been posting some interesting entries about the Mutt mail client upon his blog.

His tips are pretty basic, but that doesn't make them less useful. So here's my tip of the day: reply_regexp.

When you're viewing a mail, and you choose to reply it the subject of that mail is the basis of your message's subject. For example given a message with "Subject: hello" your reply will typically have the subject "Subject: Re: hello".

This is real rocket science here, people.

Imagine you're using SPAM filtering which tags messages it isn't sure about with a prefix "UNS:". Suddenly things don't look so hot, as you might end up with a mail with the subject:

Subject: UNS: Re: Hello

Reply to that mail, whilst being half-asleep, and what do you get? You get this:

Subject: Re: UNS: Re: Hello

Bad. Ugly. Wrong.

The following snippet in my ~/.muttrc file correctly deals with this case:

set reply_regexp="^(((UNS:[ \t])|[rR][eE]:[ \t])*)+"

Neat. Cool. Nice.

I've paid for some advertising upon the LWN.net site. (No link, I'm not trying to game things here.)

I didn't know what to expect, but I was willing to risk the expenditure as a way of saying thanks to them for their great content. (Because of my Debian Project membership I get a free LWN subscription, as do all developers. see here for details if you're a developer without a subscription.)

I've paid $30 and that has given me a months run of my advert, with clickthroughs hovering around 1%. Not horribly bad at all!

I probably won't repeat the experiment for the forseeable future, but I'm glad that I did it at least once.

If you have something appropriate for a Debian-based audience don't forget you're welcome to advertise upon the Debian Administration website for free - See the Advert FAQ for details.

ObQuote: The Craft

Update: jquery was accepted yesterday. Today I uploaded a new version to more closely align it with the javascript-policy.

Tags: advertising, jquery, lwn, mutt, muttrc | No comments