Creating a message filter based on body of post?

[Rhino]

I'm trying to create a message filter that is based on something in the
body of a newsgroup post.

I'm familiar with the process of creating message filters and have done
so for "Subject" and "From" but I can't see any way to create a filter
based on the body of the note. I've looked at the Customize option but
it seems to create a rule based on a user-specified header. When I look
at posts in the newsgroup, none of them have a "body" header.

How do I create a filter based on the body of a post? I haven't found
anything useful via Google, just massively out-of-date articles showing
many more options like "Subject" and "From" that no longer exist in Tbird.

I'm running Tbird 17.0.8 on my laptop and something very close on my
desktop. Both machines are Windows: the desktop is XP, the laptop is Win8.

--
Rhino

[Mike Easter]

If I were trying to do 'strong' filtering of news messages and were
using Windows, I would use a proxy like Nfilter/NewsProxy between me/
Tb/ and the news server, because Nfilter has wildcards and regular
expressions, which Tb doesn't.

The other part of the problem is that the first thing that happens is
that the engagement with the news server results in your downloading the
overview of the headers being downloaded, which overview does not
contain the body data you are interested in filtering on.

So the next 'step' is that you are downloading the message which
contains the body information you don't want, which you now want to
disappear from your view.

Another strong alternative to a proxy is to run a home based news server
such as Hamster to apply your filter rules to. Then you use Tb
accessing Hamster or Hamster Playground.

Nfilter seems to be disappearing, it is old.
http://www.fitnwell.net/nfilter.htm What about using NewsProxy/Nfilter
for MS Windows? (bad links to NfilterFAQ)

Another source to the faq
http://www.warezfaq.com/nfilterfaq/nfilterfaq.html nfilter FAQ

Hamster site in .en and .de http://www.elbiah.de/hamster/ Hamster
Playground is a free newsserver and mailserver software, which allows to
collect news and mails from different servers. Collected messages are
then available for any newsreader or mailclient


--
Mike Easter

[Rhino]

Sorry, but that all sounds like several hours of messing around to set
up and tweak until it works right. I was really hoping there was
something a good bit simpler that would do the job. I guess I'll just
ignore the posts that I'm trying to filter out.


--
Rhino

[Mike Easter]

Rhino wrote:

> I guess I'll just ignore the posts that I'm trying to filter out.

That is what I do. IMO ignoring is better than algorithmically
filtering -- it allows one to take 'chaotic' criteria into account -
sometimes I read messages posted by people I usually ignore, depending
on the nature of the thread their messages appear.

Sometimes I open messages from people I usually read but then ignore the
message content and flip past the 'bottom of the message' because they
failed to trim and context adequately.

etc etc

--
Mike Easter

[Rhino]

I'm surprised/disappointed that there is no easier way to filter
newsgroup posts. I had hoped I could do it simply from Tbird itself, or
failing that, with a simple add-on. It seems to me it would be an
in-demand feature. But, apparently, it isn't. So I'll continue to
"filter manually", i.e. ignore the posts I don't want to see.

--
Rhino