7.8 Followups To Yourself

Gnus offers two commands for picking out the Message-ID header in the current buffer. Gnus will then add a score rule that scores using this Message-ID on the References header of other articles. This will, in effect, increase the score of all articles that respond to the article in the current buffer. Quite useful if you want to easily note when people answer what you've said.

gnus-score-followup-article

This will add a score to articles that directly follow up your own article.

gnus-score-followup-thread

This will add a score to all articles that appear in a thread “below” your own article.

These two functions are both primarily meant to be used in hooks like message-sent-hook, like this:

     (add-hook 'message-sent-hook 'gnus-score-followup-thread)

If you look closely at your own Message-ID, you'll notice that the first two or three characters are always the same. Here's two of mine:

     <x6u3u47icf.fsf@eyesore.no>
     <x6sp9o7ibw.fsf@eyesore.no>

So “my” ident on this machine is ‘x6’. This can be exploited—the following rule will raise the score on all followups to myself:

     ("references"
      ("<x6[0-9a-z]+\\.fsf\\(_-_\\)?@.*eyesore\\.no>"
       1000 nil r))

Whether it's the first two or first three characters that are “yours” is system-dependent.