On Friday, July 11, 2003, at 03:14 PM, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
$Work, $Personal:
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.
None. The same is even true for $Junk/$NotJunk.
Not at all. $NotJunk triggers some very specific functionality (in the case of the Darwin Mail client): it tells the client's junkmail filter to not flag the message as junkmail. $Junk also triggers specific functionality: it allows the client to modify its behaviour - - e.g., to not display the message in the default folder view. It is for this very reason that we are defining these flags.
$* flags are not necessarily about automatic processing, they are about special client behavior or special handling by the server.
Well, you just contradicted yourself. Maybe you need to think about the framework some more, and decide what specific problem it is that you are trying to address.
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 think we can design an arbitrary complex set of rules and never agree.
In other words, $Work and $Personal cannot be specified tightly enough to provide any useful functionality.
Couple of mail clients (Mozilla and I believe Eudora) use this labels, this suggests they are usable.
No, it suggests they exist. It's impossible to say if they are useful until we know exactly how they are used by those clients.
$Important
This section attempts to define both the Priority and X-Priority RFC 2822 headers. This is completely out of scope for this document
I don't mind reference an existing document.
I don't understand this. What document are you referring to?
(and simply cannot be done in the case of X-Priority).
Most things can be done :-).
Are you suggesting that we start standardizing X- mail headers?
This flag is supposed to be automatically settable by the server (delivery agent or IMAP), so it has to document which headers are to be used.
No it does not, and it cannot. We can define what it means when the flag is set, but just as with $Adult, no two people will ever share the exact same definition of what makes a message $Important to begin with. (And speaking personally, I would *NEVER* implement a mechanism that would let someone else set this flag for me.)
--lyndon
