On Sun, 06 Jun 2021 10:22:38 -0700 Jon Steinhart <jon(_at_)fourwinds(_dot_)com>
sez:
Ken Hornstein writes:
Out of curiosity, then what is the value of "extras?" Was there
a time it provided value, before header content exploded?
Well, I don't mean to crap on anyone, Robert Elz in particular, but
you can kind of see what I would call the original MH thinking here:
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2014-06/msg00084.html
But I think Robert comes from an era BEFORE everyone started cramming
non user-readable metadata into email headers. Whether or not that is a
good idea is not really relevant at this point ... that ship has sailed.
Honestly I'd be up for changing the default mhl file at this point, but
I am sure there will be objections :-)
--Ken
I would be in favor of removing the extras from the default files.
Most of what I'm seeing in headers is stuff like spam filter rankings.
Never understood what I was supposed to do with this except use it to
tune spam to get through. Also piles of versioning information for
microsoft projects which is also useless to me, like what would I as
a recipient do with x-ms-office365-filtering-correlation-id?
Jon
On Sun, 06 Jun 2021 20:30:09 +0300 Greg Minshall
<minshall(_at_)umich(_dot_)edu> sez:
fwiw, i'm up to 732 ignored components. but, i'm happy adding them as
needed -- always the optimist that some day, some vital, otherwise
un-acknowledged, header will show up in an e-mail i am viewing.
cheers, Greg
On Mon, 07 Jun 2021 03:26:42 +0700 Robert Elz
<kre(_at_)munnari(_dot_)OZ(_dot_)AU> sez:
Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2021 12:29:15 -0400
From: Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com>
Message-ID:
<20210606162916(_dot_)BB968D5DBD(_at_)pb-smtp2(_dot_)pobox(_dot_)com>
| But I think Robert comes from an era BEFORE everyone started cramming
| non user-readable metadata into email headers.
That I did. Back then people occasionally created new and meaningful
new header fields - not often, but there were some. That was also a time
when more users understood e-mail and had more control over what their
mailers did.
| Honestly I'd be up for changing the default mhl file at this point, but
| I am sure there will be objections :-)
If you're imagining that I am going to be one, then ... I finally gave
up and deleted the Extras line from my mhl.format back in January.
These days all the newly invented fields are nonsense (most don't deserve
to exist at all, much less ever be seen by a human - or anything else).
kre
On Sun, 06 Jun 2021 22:22:31 +0100 Ralph Corderoy
<ralph(_at_)inputplus(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> sez:
Hi,
kre wrote:
Back then people occasionally created new and meaningful new header
fields - not often, but there were some.
I have ‘extras’ in place from back when it was useful to see the
occasional new header and decide whether to nuke it. I've been
thinking for a while that rather than search for the next /^$/ to skip
to the meat of the email, I should play around with a new user account
to concoct an .mh_profile, etc., from scratch for the modern,
what-are-they-thinking, era.
I see no value in extras being in the defaults for a new user.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
+1 from me for changing the default, and removing ignores/extras.
Thanks for the historical insight, guys!
I did think that that might be the reason to maintain them. And,
in fact, on rare occasion (maybe 1x/decade) seeing "new" headers
was useful. One particular example is the mailing list links:
I'm on other lists where I (more) frequently post but am not an
admin, and I sometimes receive direct messages from people asking
me to remove them from the list -- and I point them to similar
links in those messages.
Thus, I felt somewhat loathe to recommend the default be to not
use them at all -- which would making it likely that they are
never used by new users. That said ... one could also suggest
the current "default" as an alternative in the mhl(1mh) man page.
On the other hand, for a new user, it might be overwhelming to
create their own list of "ignores" directives. I have 100
entries. Greg mentioned 732. I wouldn't be surprised if some
others have even more. For us old fogeys, who've built this up
over decades, it's not that hard to add another one occasionally.
But that might be a reason for a new user to give up on NMH.
So, I've come around to Robert's reversal ... only 5 months after
him. B-) But, I couldn't bear to just delete the entries, so I
commented them out instead. B-)
Bob
P.S. +1 to Ralph's idea for looking into what might be a
"better" set of defaults overall for a new user.