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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

So "back in the day" when I was an undergrad at MIT I signed up for every mailing list I could get myself onto and then trained a Bayesian spam filter to recognize free food emails. I threw all free-food e-mails in a freshly-untrained spam box and sure enough, after a few hundred e-mails it kept putting free food e-mails in one folder which was extremely convenient. Spamicity (i.e. free-food-icity) for phrases like "bring spoon" and "thesis defense" were particularly high.

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I don't know how it was implemented, but there was a similar free food blitz[1] list at Dartmouth in my day. I swear, just catering the campus-funded student organizations' events must have floated half the restaurants in town. Most days, you could eat like a hobbit.

[1] Dartmouth is a weird place and for the longest time ran a unique homegrown emailish/im protocol called BlitzMail, with an entire vocabulary and culture associated with it.

Blitzmail was awesome. It was also used at Reed College.

Interesting. Read a little about BlitzMail. MIT had Zephyr as an IM system which was kind of fun.

I miss the days of those old IM systems that I could write my own processing pipelines and UIs for. It's sad that in these walled garden days of Whatsapp, Wechat et al. that there is no way for me to programatically access my own incoming messages.

I was always impressed with Blitzmail's speed. It was certainly faster than any of the email clients I use/try out these days, or at least it seems that way in my memory.

There is (was) a mailing list at MIT that was the result of your or some other persons filter across all of MIT mailing lists forwarding free food on campus. It was a lot of pizza, mostly.

vultures@ ?

That takes me back 33 years...

mooch master

I've really wanted the ability to make ad-hoc filters like this in email clients. You'd use it for free food, I'd use it to avoid having to maintain dozens of filters to correctly group a single category of work emails that refuse to be consistent.

What did you use? I'm assuming a CLI-based thing, since those seem to be the only ones that are truly flexible, but I haven't found any I actually like.

http://crm114.sourceforge.net/

Haha, I love that idea. I may try something like that next.

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