In bug 83338 I have suggested an enhancement for Mail News which would
make Mozilla a more acceptable choice for those who receive a lot of
mail from mailing lists.
Stephen suggested that I ask here for feedback on what people would
expect from this feature, how the UI should look etc.
What I was proposing (don't leap up and down, I will try to write a
patch but not in the next few weeks) is the following...
Most of us who subscribe to one or more high traffic mailing lists know
that it's vital to filter list traffic into a separate folder. Until
recently the methods for doing this reliably tended to be arcane, and
often specific to one list or listserver.
RFC2919 specifies a header line looking like this
List-Id: Arbitrary Description <unique.list.id.example.com>
This is a robust, purpose-made filter trigger. Many lists emit this line
already (if you read a lot of lists check the headers) and already some
lists I subscribe to specify List-Id as the only recommended way to
filter the list traffic.
I think the existing Mozilla filters feature can be trivially expanded
to let users filter on "List-Id" and take advantage of the work done in
getting RFC2919 accepted by list owners and server developers.
The current Filter UI offers "Subject", "Sender", "Date", "Priority",
"Status", "To", "CC", "To or CC" - the filtering rules available for
each type of filter vary.
I intend to add a further option to this drop-down, which reads
"List-Id" and initially offers the same types of rule as "Subject" the
effect of the rule would of course apply to the "List-Id:" header as
described above
e.g.
[List-Id v] [Contains v] <example.list.example.com>
Does anyone have any objections to this design? Suggestions? Gotchas I
should know about when trying to implement it?
Nick.
