From kragen@dnaco.net Mon Sep 14 22:50:33 1998 Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 22:50:31 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" cc: tech@clug.org Subject: Re: procmail filters (was Re: Regular Expressions) In-Reply-To: <19980914191828.V26128@ebb.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1991 Status: O X-Status: On Mon, 14 Sep 1998, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > The only way around this that I know of is to keep a file of MSG-ID's and > look up each message, which is too slow. I know many people who do this. What do you mean by "too slow"? I only receive about 100-150 messages a day, and at that rate, I could receive mail with little difficulty if it took ten minutes per message. I suspect other people are even better off. (Sorry, I'm in a dreadfully quantitative mood. Just went to see Pi, and it really got me going when the mathematical-genius protagonist says, "You've written down all the 216-digit numbers already, haven't you?" I nearly went through the roof of the theater. I tried to explain the size of 10^216 all the way home to my wife. "If you took the number of seconds in the lifetime of the universe to date, and replaced each second with the entire lifetime of the universe, and then replacd each second in the resulting span of time with the length of that entire resulting length of time, and then had every fundamental particle in the universe somehow write down a trillion 216-digit numbers a second, you'd still be able to cover only 10^-48 or so of the space of 216-digit numbers -- 1/1,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 or so, that is." Hard to explain.) (Hint: don't go see this movie if you are prone to nitpicking and you know anything about either the game of go or math, or (I suspect but don't have the knowledge to prove) mental illness or Qabbala.) Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker The sages do not believe that making no mistakes is a blessing. They believe, rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new man of himself. -- Wang Yang-Ming