On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 07:00:29AM +0200, Martin Rex wrote:
With subject_prefix I can quite easily tell apart discussions from several
IETF mailing lists, and it works with _every_ MUA with default settings.
The fact that poor, broken, obsolete, or non-standards-compliant
MUAs exist is not a valid reason for inflicting a fundamentally-broken
kludge on the people who have chosen their MUAs with care.
And actually, no, you can't *always* tell those discussion apart,
nor can you tell them from off-list replies...because (a) discussions
which cross multiple lists may carry the subject-line tags from
each list and (b) off-list replies will also -- unless someone takes the
time to hand-edit the Subject line and remove the tag or mark it
[off-list] -- carry the tag. This is one of the many reasons why
List-Id is vastly superior: it solves both these problems.
For example, consider these exquisite little inconveniences (chosen
from thousands of examples on hand):
Subject: Re: [asterisk-security] [asterisk-dev] dahdi system.conf update
Subject: [WEB SECURITY] [HITB-Announce] HITB2011AMS Conference Materials
Subject: [opensuse-project] Re: [opensuse-testing] Re:
[opensuse-factory] Request to change MS6
I like the last one particularly: as the conversation thread migrated,
the subject-line tags managed to gradually colonize the entire Subject
line, thereby obliviating the actual Subject. (Yes, incidentally, I suppose
you could set up your MUA to honor the leftmost tag, but that does nothing
to solve problem (b) above or any of the other I haven't bothered to enumerate,
and anyway if your MUA is that smart...then you could just use List-Id.)
And I haven't even gotten into all the circumstances where [.*] appears
on a Subject line and has nothing to do with the mailing list's name.
---rsk
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