Spam Action rules: first match vs. all match?

[Julian Field]

What was the general consensus on this subject?

Is it worth my implementing this "stop" keyword? It will cause a couple of
extra "if" statements inside a function that is called a few dozen times
for each message, so I don't want to add it unless quite a few people will
find it useful.

At 18:37 28/07/2003, you wrote:
>On Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:02:33 +0100, Julian Field
><mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> wrote:
>
> >What I thought about doing was adding a "STOP" entry in any of the "all
> >matches" rules, so that evaluation of the rules for that recipient/sender
> >would stop at that point and not carry on trying to match other rules in
> >the ruleset.
> >
> >The rules would still be evaluated for all of the recipient(s) and the
> >sender, but this would enable you to stop the rule checking when you had
> >matched a previous rule.
> >
> >Would that solve the problem, or indeed help at all?
>
>How would that work?  If you mean something like this:
>
>FromAndTo: *@primary.domain forward zzz at yyy
>STOP
>To:  *@primary.domain bounce forward zzz at yyy
>FromOrTo: default   deliver forward zzz at yyy
>
>meaning that when the STOP line is encountered, rule matching should
>stop if any above rules had matched, that would work for me and would
>actually add quite a bit of flexibility.  It would make it possible to
>do things like have a specific list of users or subdomains in a domain
>that get special treatment.  For example:
>
>From:  user1 at domain.com deliver
>From:  user2 at domain.com deliver
>From:  user3 at one.domain.com deliver
>From:  user4 at two.domain.com deliver
>From:  *@two.domain.com forward zzz at yyy
>STOP
>From:  *@one.domain.com forward zzz at yyy
>STOP
>From:  *@*.domain.com  bounce forward zzz at yyy
>From:  *@domain.com  bounce forward zzz at yyy
>
>Semantics such as what would result from the above could be tricky to
>achieve with either all or first rules.  If it weren't for user4, then
>the above without STOP would be the same as if it were interpreted as
>first match, but with the above as all with STOP implemented,
>user4 at two.domain.com's actions would be "deliver forward zzz at yyy".
>(Okay, this example would be easy to make work with first, but
>still...)
>
>Another option I had been thinking about would be to able to mark a
>single rule as exclusive, but I think the above is better.
>
>--
>Jay Berkenbilt <ejb at ql.org>
>http://www.ql.org/q/

--
Julian Field
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