Administrivia: Subject line tagging

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2004, at 10:21am, jason at sigio.com wrote:
> I have a request that I'd like to put up for discussion.

  This has been discussed before.  The general consensus appears to be that
there are already several headers one can filter on, including at least one
that is specifically designed and designated for this purpose (List-Id), and
that one should use those, and not commandeer another header for the
purpose.

  Unlike the "Reply-To" debate (which was a close vote), opinion appears to
be pretty much one-sided on this one, both then and now.

> This would facilitate filtering of messages into appropriate mail folders
> without having to scan all the headers looking for the right bit of
> information.

  The computer has to scan all the headers to find the "Subject" header
anyway, so this doesn't really gain you anything.

> As it is now, messages to the discuss list could contain
> disscuss at gnhlug.org or gnhlug-discuss@ or not even contain those if the
> message was a BCC. (Why you'd BCC to a list, I don't know, but you could.)

  The list software will reject any message sent to this list that does not
explicitly mention a configured list alias in either the "To" or "Cc"
header.

  But anyway, the "List-Id" header is guaranteed to be present and the same
for all messages delivered through this mailing list.  So, one should filter
on that, and not anything else, to identify list mail.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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