[MlMt] Marking messages as read on open; Mailing Lists smart folder

[Bill Cole]

On 29 Jun 2017, at 14:54, Patrick Pritchard wrote:

> 1. In the Mailing Lists smart folder, sometimes new “lists” are 
> created with absolute gibberish for names, such as 
> “6141152_5959791”.  I surmise that this is because the senders are 
> using auto-email generators to email in bulk, and MlMt is grouping 
> these accordingly…

Yes, and it's even worse: some of these set the "List-Id" header to 
something different for every message. It's a misuse of the header and 
breaks (I suspect intentionally...) the utility of the header as 
designed. The worst offenders in my opinion with this are the 
spam-for-hire operators ExactTarget & MailChimp, who get that ranking 
because they send enough legit mail that I can't just junk all of it.

> Is there a way to fix this and/or adjust this?  After a day I may have 
> 10 “new” mailing lists show up, which aren’t actually lists.  
> (But legitimate lists do show up, legitimately, which is nice!).

To handle the aforementioned miscreants, I've added conditions to my 
Mailing Lists mailbox that the List-Id header does not contain 
'list-id.mcsv.net' or 'xt.local' which are fingerprints of MailChimp and 
ExactTarget respectively.

Another approach I use for my most active discussion lists is that I 
sort them on arrival into their own IMAP (not "Smart") mailboxes that 
are all inside a "Lists" folder, so that I can then have a "Smart" 
mailbox that contains the past fortnight of messages from all mailboxes 
underneath "Lists" split into submailboxes by mailbox name. This is also 
helpful for mailing lists that don't use List-Id headers, since the 
rules sorting messages on arrival can target whatever arbitrary header 
fingerprints work for a particular list.