On Sun, Nov 29, 1998 at 05:18:24PM -0500, Jeff Breidenbach wrote: > > >1) If the archiving is done by the received field, the list maintainer > >can have no way of inluencing the order according to which messages > >are archived. Not good, especially if one has to send in older > >messages to the archive. > > I agree, it sucks. (I hate tradeoffs like this.) > > >2) Perhaps it should be left to the list maintainer to make sure the > >Date fields are properly written (like every message could have the > >Date filed rewritten when it is received by the list). > > Maybe. It seems like there are valid arguments for either way. > (And certainly people complain with either choice!)
Well, I have not seen the arguments in detail. It seems true that Date is not reliable, but a particular list manager can make them conform to standards by rewriting them. Tools like procmail, maildrop, mess822 are free. > > >3) How about supporting an X-Archive-With-Date field? The archiving > >could be done according to the rule <snip> > > Are there any standard headers for this? Is there an "archive-date" > header in some RFC? > I'll check into them (I already grepped rfc822 without succes, that is why I suggested the above: it is not standard, hence the X- ). I thought that MHonArc can be given an archiving rule like x-archive-with-date/date/received which means: parse each message; if you see x-archive-with-date, use that for sorting, if you see date in proper format, use that for sorting, else use the first received line found. > >If the archiving rule stays as it is now (received/date), it is > >impossible to send in older messages to the archive. > > Do you want me to manually set your particular archive(s) for > Date: sorting? > > Jeff You are very nice, and I think I'd like to have that (could be a dangerous precedent!). But it would be better to find a solution which would work for every list on the archive. (Perhaps for each list a command address could be set up that would tell MHonArc how to archive. For example, the list manager ezmlm sets up several addresses like that to make remote administration a snap---but my understanding is that MTAs other than qmail do not make this easy/possible) I can wait for a week or so. If a good solution is not found, I will ask you to set the sorting by Date for my two lists (there will be two more later). Thanks Mate -- --- Mate Wierdl | Dept. of Math. Sciences | University of Memphis
