Apple Mail filters suck

While I would normally use gnus/gmane for mailing lists, cygwin-apps‘s gmane gateway is read-only, so sending a message necessitates an ezmlm subscription. Unlike mailman, ezmlm doesn’t allow you to be subscribed in a “don’t send me mail” state.

So I end up with 38 emails of noise in my inbox overnight, which would be fine, except that interspersed with these are personal emails which I overlook.

One of the nifty features of M2 was its automatic mailboxes for mailing lists. IIRC thunderbird had similar “virtual folders”, and Apple Mail has a “Smart Mailbox” feature that is essentially stored filters. The only problem is, the Apple smartness is limited to a few predefined fields, and the “Mailing-List” and “List-Id” headers aren’t among them. However, you *can* add custom headers for “Rules”, but this requires a genuine folder (e.g. an IMAP folder), and by that point it’s a better policy to add the rule server-side.

So, here’s the maildrop ~/.mailfilter rule:

if (/^List-Id:.*/)
{
        exception {
                to $DEFAULT/.Lists/
        }
}