On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 12:44:43PM -0400, James M Galvin wrote:
> For every elist to which a person subscribes you have to get a few
> messages and then determine how best to identify those messages so you
> can filter them. What I'm particularly noticing is a trend (in my
> opinion overzealous) towards personalization that is eliminating one of
> the key distinctions (and the only remaining general test) between
> personal email and elist messages.
I completely agree. The newbies running many of the mailing lists
out there are either not thinking through all of the issues *or* are
selfish enough to attempt to deploy a solution which works for *them*...
but which hoses everyone else.
That said, a standard mechanism by which mailing list messages can be
filtered is highly desirable. Clearly, "Subject:" line tags are a farce
and can't be used; the "To:" field can sometimes be used, as can the
"Cc:" field (and procmail has a mechanism to treat both the same way
w.r.t. filtering); "Sender:" can sometimes be used but many mailing
lists don't set it correctly -- and a surprising number of sites don't
treat it correctly; amd "X-Mailing-List:" is, AFAIK, not part of any RFC.
Time out for a quick check...okay, the procmail rulesets in place here
indicate that 331 out of 362 mailing lists can be filtered correctly
using "TO"; "Sender:" works for 23 of those left over; and the rest
fall into miscellaneous categories.
---Rsk
