[gnu.emacs.gnus] selective dissemination of usenet information

emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (03/03/90)

Mitchell Wylie, in <1190@gorath.cs.utexas.edu>, writes

  SDI systems (Selective Dissemination of Information) are sort of like
  boolean retrieval but they give you only new items since the last query,
  and query for you automatically and periodically.  The system searches for
  you.

  I want to build a very simple e-mail based SDI system for usenet news.
  Perl seems ideal for such an application.

I do this in 'gnus', the gnu emacs newsreader.

Here's a sample kill file:

~News/comp.lang.c.KILL
(gnus-kill "" "FTP" "u")
(gnus-kill "From" "Torek\\|Spencer\\|Gwyn\\|pardo" "u")
(gnus-kill "Subject" ".")
(gnus-expunge "X")

i.e. search everywhere for FTP, read stuff by these folks, and
ditch the rest.  For comp.sys.amiga.hardware:

(gnus-kill "" "FTP\\|SCSI" "u")
(gnus-kill "Subject" ".")
(gnus-expunge "X")

No doubt there's an equally good way with perl.