>>Please could we drop the [Devel] which serves no useful purpose and >>just obscures the _real_ subject line? > >I'm very surprised anyone would object to this. This tag, which is common to >mailman lists, is enormously useful for e-mail filtering. It certainly helps >me distinguish mailing list messages from the depressingly vast array of e-mail >I already get just by scanning my inbox.
That is why all GNU mailman mailing lists have a header line: X-BeenThere: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Other mailing list managers have the X-BeenThere line as well, or the X-Mailing-List line, or List-Id. As simple as it is to search the subject for [listname], it is to search for the designated X-BeenThere line, however searching for the X-BeenThere has the additional benefit of not cluttering up the subject line. This of course is one of the age old ongoing and neverending internet mailinglist flamewar discussion topics which endlessly rage on when they're brought up, and tend to be about 50% for and 50% against and end only when someone invokes Godwin's law or the list maintainer makes their official say in the matter final and requests the entire thread be dropped. ;o) Having been involved in these types of pointless 50/50 flamewars myself in the past one too many times, I decided a long time back to do something about it myself, but from my end. I procmail out the offending [listname] myself on lists that put it there. It only takes me a minute to set it up in procmail, and it gives an eternity of Subject line enjoyment from then onward, while all the people who like the [listname] weirdness get to enjoy their preference as well. ;o) For those who are as annoyed as I am by GNU mailman defaulting to putting [listname] in subject line headers, and most mailing list admins simply sticking to the defaults, here is the procmail rule that will undo this GNU braindamage should you find yourself receiving email that does this. ;o) Add this to your ~/.procmailrc # [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list :0 fhw * ^X-BeenThere:.*[EMAIL PROTECTED] | sed -e '/^Subject:/ s/\[Devel\] *//g' :0 A: devel For those not familiar with procmail and whom think the above looks insane, or resembles the lower half of sendmail.cf, what it does, is strip the [listname] out of the subject, multiple times if present, and then file it in the folder named "devel" (at the very bottom). The very top line by the way is merely a comment. To make it work with other mailing lists, simply change the comment at the top, the line that has X-BeenThere to reflect the mailing list at hand, and the subject line in between the []'s as well as the folder name at the very bottom. Enjoy many lists whom use the subject line listname annoyance in complete peace and harmony, and without getting sucked in to 50/50 flamewars. This leaves you tonnes more time to participate in other, much more worthy flamewars that might also seem equally pointless, but for which procmail can't help. ;o) -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
