Better Random Subject Lines

Earlier I talked about generating random Subject lines for emails. I settled on something that looked like Subject: Your email (1024) . Those were fine, but got dull quickly. By switching the procmail rules to look like:

:0 fhw
* ^Subject:[\ ]*$
|formail -i "Subject: RANDOM: $(fortune -n 65 -s | perl -pe 's/\s+/ /g')"

:0 fhw
* !^Subject:
|formail -i "Subject: RANDOM: $(fortune -n 65 -s | perl -pe 's/\s+/ /g')"

I'm now able to get random subject lines with a little more meat to them. They come out looking like: RANDOM: The coast was clear. -- Lope de Vega

However, given that the default fortune data files only provide 3371 sayings that are 65 characters or under the Birthday_paradox will cause a subject collision a lot sooner than with the 2:superscript:15 possible subject lines I had before.

Update: It's been a few weeks since I've had this in place and my principle subject-less correspondent has noticed how eerily often the random subject lines match the topic of the email.

Published: Feb 2, 2005, 6:00:00 AM - Modified: Jan 28, 2011, 5:55:26 AM by Ry4an Brase
Tags: perl, ideas-built, software
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