I've been away from my email for a while and I just returned to
find that my redhat-devel-list mail filter stopped capturing
messages to the list quite some time back.
Upon examining both my filter, and the full headers of messages
from the list I've determined that someone has changed the
format of the headers in several ways.
Here are some comments about the problems I perceive, along with
some suggestions on how to solve the problems.
1) Most if not all redhat mailing lists, and a large majority of
other mailing lists out there use the header "X-Mailing-List" to
indicate in an RFC compiant way that a given message has come
from a particular mailing list. This list aparently started
using this method when it started, but somewhere along the way
this changed. I now see a "List-Id:" field instead, which I am
assuming is supposed to serve the same purpose. If I am not
mistaken, "List-Id" is not a valid RFC mail header, and also if
I'm not mistaken, non standard mail headers are supposed to be
prefixed with "X-" if they are to be used. Correct me if I'm
wrong here please as I haven't looked at RFC 822 for a while.
2) The subject line of every single message contains the list
name in it. The purpose of this is twofold. 1 - it lets a
receiver instantly know what mailing list the message came from,
and 2 - it allows a user to sort mail by monitoring the Subject
line with a mail filter. These are obviously useful things to
have, however they are not necessary, and also come with
disadvantages. The reason it is not necessary is that most if
not all current mail filter software can typically filter mail
based on ANY header field. Therefore most mailing lists include
an X-Mailing-List header, or use the Sender: header to indicate
that it is a message from a list. Mail filter software can then
use one of these fields instead to sort mail on. This free's up
the subject line, so that when someone looks at their email
index, they can actually SEE the real subject.
Therefore, my request to you is to please remove the mailing list
name from the subject line, and put it in an X-Mailing-List
header instead. This follows the convention used by many other
mailing lists, as well as all other redhat.com mailing lists I've
been on.
If anyone out there has difficulty filtering email based on other
header fields, I would be more than welcome to aide in
configuring your mailer, or sending procmail rules.
Thanks in advance.
Take care,
TTYL
--
Mike A. Harris Linux advocate
Computer Consultant GNU advocate
Capslock Consulting Open Source advocate
I've overclocked my keyboard interface. It's quite messy dipping my
hands into the mineral oil, but *MAN* is my keyboard ever fast now!
- Anonymous Coward
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