Is there a need to standardize these? It seems to me that the
reason for $* flags is to ensure functional compatibility
between clients. I cannot think of any functionality that would
be triggered by these flags. All they're really useful for is
narrowing the view on a folder, and that can be done using
any user flag. And for that sort of narrowing, having just
these two flags is much too restrictive. If my mail is
varied enough to require this sort of markup, odds are good
that I'm going to be using a more fine-grained set of
categories (e.g., work.sysadmin, work.benefits, personal.kids,
personal.carinsurance).I don't think these two should be standardized.
$Important
This section attempts to define both the Priority and X-Priority
RFC 2822 headers. This is completely out of scope for this
document (and simply cannot be done in the case of X-Priority). The two paragraphs that refer to these headers must be removed. They
could be replaced by text that suggests the delivery agent might
want to set this flag based on examination of the RFC 2822 headers
(but should not specifically refer to Priority or X-Priority).$Adult
The two MUSTs must be changed to MAYs. We're defining a tool,
not a code of behaviour.$Spam
I think better functionality is achieved using $Junk and $NotJunk.
The latter provides a mechanism for the user to override the server's
or client's categorization. This is required functionality. The way
Apple Mail handles this is for the client to set the Junk flag when
its internal spam filter triggers on a message. If I decide the message
is not spam I can hit a button that says "this isn't spam" which then
sets the NotJunk flag, and clears the Junk flag. If, at a later time,
the client needs to resync the folder for some reason (causing it to
re-apply the spam filter tests), the NotJunk marked messages won't
get re-classified as spam.$Forwarded
Is this really useful in real life? Without knowing who the message
was forwarded to, and when, I don't see much practical value. This
information is better stored using annotate.--lyndon
