--On Saturday, July 06, 2002 9:13 AM -0700 JC Dill 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 06:01 AM 7/6/02, Bernie Cosell wrote:
...
>  >For example, for this list, my filter sorts on:
>  >
>  >Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> That's a great idea in principle, but how many ordinary users have both
> the knowledge and the ability to filter on fields like Sender?

That's a tricky question, because if you first ask "how many ordinary users 
have the knowledge and ability to filter AT ALL" or to do any kind of 
auto-foldering, the number is pretty small.  Most fancy MUA's now have 
"Rules" or "Filters" engines of some kind, but understanding and wrangling 
them can be a Byzantine exercise.

One possible bright spot is that with Mozilla Mail, it ought to be possible 
(in theory - I haven't messed with it myself) to offer a self-contained 
"installable filter setting" that you could put on a companion webpage and 
let members click on.  We could also agree on an XML standard for 
describing how to filter a list, put a Web-based generator for that XML 
online somewhere, and then let list admins visit it, enter their list info 
and grab the resulting XML, and/or let the results be stored at the 
generator site, so that members could visit the site, pick the list(s) 
they're on, pick the MUA they use, and generate a page of instructions or a 
config file that would set up filtering for them.  Just some thoughts.

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