To give you an indication of the energy behind ESME I thought it would be good to reprint an email from David Pollak entitled I’m so frickin’ stoked:

So… I finally got my head wrapped around “Actions”.  They are applied to and performed against stuff that lands in your mailbox (we may have to unify them with tracking… but not today.)

Actions that can be taken are:

  • filter — filter the message out and don’t put it in your mailbox
  • resend — resend the message to all your followers (it will only be put in their mailbox if it’s not already in their mb)  This means that anyone can set up lotd or something else like it.
  • mailto:dpp@athena.com — send the body of the message to dpp@athena.com
  • http://server — do an HTTP(S) POST of the message on a server with certain headers set

But the cool thing is that the actions are only performed if the expression evaluates to true:

  • @dpp — if it was sent by dpp
  • any — matches any message
  • /regex/ — if the body matches a regular expression
  • “string” — if the body contains the case insensitive string
  • #tag — if the message contains the tag
  • to = @dpp — if the message was @sent to dpp
  • to = (@dpp, @m) — if the message was @sent to dpp or m
  • to <> @dpp — if the message was sent to @dpp
  • not(expression) — if the expression evaluates to false
  • exp1 | exp2 — if either expression is true
  • exp1 & exp2 — if both of the expressions are true
  • (exp) — grouping expressions with parens
  • day, date, month, hour, minute >, <, >=, <= number test the current (time-zone adjusted) against an integer
  • day, date, month, hour minute =, <> number or (number, number, number) — is the current time equal (not equal) or in the given range
  • 54% — will be true 54% of the time (used for me filtering out 70% of the lotd posts)

So, Filter/@dpp will filter anything from @dpp (block messages that @dpp sends), etc.

Over time, we can enhance the grammar to perform other tests.

How many people do you know who could say the same thing?