Bulk and serious messages are both from the same businesses, aren’t they? Yes, that’s right, but they use different From/Return-Path/… header field values.
So how to recognise bulk messages?
- Sometimes they use “news.” within the “Return-Path“.
- Sometimes they use the “List-Id” header field.
- Sometimes they use the “List-Unsubscribe” header field.
And they like changing they bulk mailing software resp. their providers, that certainly makes it tedious. But … it’s also fun to catch them, and to receive fewer messages within the message folders for the serious stuff, and to see them going to the message folders for the bulk stuff.
Right, and I am still (sort of successfully) improving the pretty printer for the procmail log file … – lots of relevant fields get UTF-8 / ISO-8859-1 / ISO-8859-15 encoded these days, and I certainly want to only see their decoded equivalents – and procmail itself only shows you the encoded originals.