[BLU]

[ddm at pizzashack.org (Derek D. Martin)]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 09:04:06PM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> Some people have been adding [BLU] to the subjects manually. I can
> easily add that to the majordomo config to generate them
> automatically. I have that set up on a couple of others lists. Makes
> it easiy to set up filters.

As long as we're voting, I object.  I find that it obscures the
subject and makes it hard to discover what the message is about, and
it also throws off message threading.  

AFAIK it's easy enough to filter on the To:, From:, and CC: headers
using procmail, Netscape, and Outlook, as well as other mailers which
do filtering; and (based on how few messages to this list my filters
don't catch) I'd have to estimate that much less than 1% of messages
sent to this list don't containg the address <discuss at blu.org> in one
of those headers.  I don't find that it makes the messages any easier
to filter, and especially for those of us who use 80-character wide
text-based mailers, makes determining the subject of the message, and
therefore the value of the message to us, much harder.  It isn't /so/
bad in this case since the string "[BLU]" is only 5 characters, but
that's still 5 (or 6 or 7 with a space and/or colon as a separator)
characters less of subject information that I get to see.  If you use
message threading, it also may or may not play nice with threads,
depending on how well the sender's mail client conforms to standards.

And for good measure, I'm against header munging on general
principle.

That's my $0.0002  =8^)


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Derek Martin          |   Unix/Linux geek
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