At 10:10 AM -0400 6/13/02, Brian D is rumored to have typed:
On 13 Jun,
Robert Adkins <raa(_at_)impelind(_dot_)com> wrote:
<snip>
The other mailing lists that I subscribe to simply put in the subject
section a simple explanation of where this mail is coming from. May I ask
why that is so difficult to do?
It isn't difficult to do. It isn't NECESSARY, either, since moderm email
clients (and not so modern ones; I'm using one from 1997) can filter on other
header fields than the Subject:. If your mail client cannot do this, I
suggest you change email clients. Otherwise, why muck with the subject when
it isn't necessary, and is just bothersome?
Subject munges are NEVER necessary, and are (at least to me) really
annoying. Truth is, it's never necessary for a mailing list to munge _any_
existing header field; these munges (Reply-To:, etc.) just make life
difficult for those of us who who know better without adding ANY additional
benefit to those who don't. Instead, we should be teaching our subscribers
how to _properly_ filter their email, how to _properly_ reply to messages
(not every message _belongs_ on the list), etc., etc.
But instead we all drop down to the level of Yahoo! and its ilk.
(For those lists which do these silly things, I've had to write procmail
recipies in an rc.mailinglist include file to revert them _back_ as much as
possible; removing the garbage from the subjects, dropping the list-added
Reply-To: header fields [yes, I know it can't replace one the sender might
have originally included, but it's the best I can do], etc., etc. Even for
_this_ list, I have to remove the footer that the server adds...avoids even
the the possibility of mistakenly quoting it back to the list, and I can read
the list-* header fields, thanks.)
:0:
* ^List-Id:.*procmail
/var/spool/mail/procmail
Since this list uses mailman, it makes more sense to filter on the
X-BeenThere: header field, like:
* ^X-BeenThere: procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
...or any subset of the mailing list address you might want to use.
SmartList lists are easier to filter on the X-Loop: or X-Mailing-List: header
fields, and other packages use other unique identifiers. But my guess is that
Mr. Adkins is using some other OS' mail client, and not filtering with
procmail in the first place.
If you put extraneous garbage in the subject line it displaces the subject,
which is what the header is for, along what is often a small display for the
subject in the reader which will probably truncate it.
Thank you...much more eloquent than I have been.
Charlie
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