Thoth has one of the most extensive preferences facilities of any Mac application. With this installment in our series on using filters, I’m going to explain the finer points of the Filtering preferences panel.
To open the Filtering preferences, open the preferences panel. It’s under the application name under Mac OS X, and under the Edit menu in Mac OS 9. Using the Topic popup menu, select filtering. The panel that appears will contain three columns: a set of checkboxes, a list of color labels, and a number of button controls.
The first checkbox is the simplest: Disable Filtering. It does exactly what is says – turn off filtering. Whenever a set of headers is downloaded, the message list window checks this preference when it opens, and if set, bypasses the filtering process. Why is this valuable? Filters extract a speed penalty. Turning it off speeds up the display. Also, while using a good set of filters can save you plenty of time by hiding unnecessary posts, it sometimes it works too well. Turning off all the filters is a quick way to insure you are scanning all the posts in a given group located on the server.
Keep Expired Filters instructs Thoth not to dispose of filters after they expire. Every filter has an expiration date. Saving expired filters gives you a chance to preserve the filter and reset the expiration date so that it can be used again. Keeping Expired Filters is especially useful if your filters are complex. You can spot expired filters because Thoth inserts a bullet character at the beginning of each filter’s name.
Detect Junk Binaries applies to filters that detect line counts. Since most binary files contain multiple segments, and because Thoth makes several assumptions about multi-part posts, this option is useful for catching binary files that are not multiple segments. This tends to be more useful these days with image files, since many images are contained in a single post. Thoth automatically treats the first and last segments of a multiple part post differently, since they are often much shorter than each ‘normal’ segment. However, when Detect Junk Binaries is set, Thoth looks at the 1/1 file the same way it does to the 0/1 file in an attempt to trap junk posts that were placed on the server with only two segments. Confused? Remember, a 1/1 file is really part two. 0/1 is part one.
Default Expire is another easy one. It sets the number of days before expiration for each new Filter. Default Expire by Use switches the expiration technique from an absolute number of days to a relative number of days measured from the last time the filter was triggered. Show Expiration Alert is another nearly self-explanatory preference. Setting it tells Thoth to tell you whenever a filter expires.
The Filtering preferences pane is rounded out with a set of scoring settings (which will no double be the subject of a future column) and label colors. As you may have noticed, nearly all of the settings are used to tweak newly created filters. Taking a few moments to configure these preferences will make it easier and quicker create your own personal filters.
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"Thoth Filtering Preferences"
