ietf-822
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Use of List- headers in MUAs

2001-05-24 10:20:43
At 15.27 -0700 01-05-22, Dave Crocker wrote:
GENERATING the headers is not the question. Getting user agents to notice them and use them constructive is the challenge.

A very important statement. Could we have some discussion
of this? I know that UA behaviour is often not standardized
by IETF, but in this case we might achieve better future
mailers by discussing this.

Here are my ideas on how a good MUA could interpret
LIST-headers:

The MUA should keep a data base of all mailing lists,
whose names have occurred in incoming List-headers.
Possibly, there might be a procedure to remove old
items which have not been seen recently from this
list.

The MUA should in some way ask the user, whether the
user wants to join mailing lists on this list.
This can be done in different ways. One way would
be to do something similar to the list of new
newsgroups provided by News UAs. I.e. the MUA
might once a day send a message to its user,
listing new mailing lists and asking the user
whether to join them.

The MUA should provide commands for joining and
leaving mailing lists, based on the list of known
mailing lists described above. Possibly, such
a command might also be able to search for and
retrieve mailing list descriptions from the web.

When a user tells his MUA to join a mailing list,
the default behaviour of the MUA should be to set
up a separate folder for each mailing list, and
to set up a filter which filters incoming messages
from this list to that folder. (A user should
of course be able to override this if the user
prefers his personally managed set of filters.)
This is important, because many users who are
not mail experts find it difficult to set up
filters on their own.

Even more user-friendly might be if the MUA
allowed users to sort the list-connected folders
according to personal priority, and read commands
which makes it easy to browse new messages,
folder by folder in the order of priority chosen
by the user.

If we could persuade one of the major players
to implement this, I believe the others will
rapidly follow!
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/