Administrivia: Subject line tagging

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 10:21:32AM -0400, Jason Stephenson wrote:
> I have a request that I'd like to put up for discussion. I think it 
> would be very handy if subject lines of messages sent to/from the 
> gnhglug lists were prepended with the list name in brackets. 

This is [IMNSHO] the wrong solution for the following reasons:

Filtering on ^subject:.*gnhlug is practically speaking no different
from filtering on something like ^(from|to|cc):.*gnhlug -- i.e. the
information you need to filter on already exists in every message sent
by the list.  Adding it to the subject line is reduntant.  [IMO this
alone is grounds to reject the idea.]  

Some mailers could conceivably only allow filtering on the subject
line, or suffer from other similar brain-dead lmitations.  The
argument can be made that adding a subject tag makes things better for
such people.  Maybe it does, but only at the expense of everyone who
had the sense to choose a better mail client.  Virutally all mail
clients display the message index all on one line per message.  This
means that the sender, subject, date, and often many other peices of
information are all competing for space  on any given message index
line.  Prepending the list name to the subject line, especially one as
long as [gnhlug-discuss],  guarantees that many users will often not
see enough of the message subject to make an informed decision about
whether or not the message is worth viewing (or, more importantly to
those on slow links, downloading).

There are probably also more reasons that I'm not thinking of off the
top of my head, but this is a discussion that gets bashed about on
virtually every mailing list in existence from time to time, so no
doubt doing a web search  on something like "subject tag" will yeild a
voluminous amount of argumentation on both sides of the issue.  

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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