While...
(1) I agree that this (and any SpamAssassin or other header-insertion or filtering) would, ideally, better be done as a per-subscriber optional feature, and (2) I recognize that, if for some reason (unfathomable to me, but there is no accounting for taste), people encapsulate messages in message/rfc822 body parts and then sign them (or archive hashes of messages including the headers), any modification of the encapsulated message would wreak havoc, and (3) I've got an MUA (and an MTA) that are capable of filtering on Return-path and/or List-* and/or receipient (including subaddress)fields,
there are three things about this discussion that bother me...
(i) A number of efforts within the community have pointed to the advantages of having more routine work done in a routine and automated way by the secretariat. Since the secretariat is operating with very tight resources (something else that has been in enough documents and presentations that I assume/hope everyone knows), it is in _our_ advantage to let them automate anything they can sensibly automate without causing _severe_ problems. Conversely, asking for things that might take large amounts of time and energy (such as per-user setting of tag fields or application of spam filtering), is, IMO, pretty lousy prioritization.
(ii) Even with powerful filtering and organizing tools, some of us prefer (as a matter of taste) to not have, e.g., one folder or color per mailing list or other correspondent. For us, a subject line indicator of source makes it easier to organize things cognitively. Is it a big deal one way or the other? Not for me at least; I can't speak for others. But it is helpful to some of us, regardless of what the MTA or MUA may or be able to do. And that makes me (at least) a little intolerant of people starting religious wars that, themselves, consume large amounts of (human as well as network) bandwidth, if only because...
(iii) I am, personally, getting concerned that the IETF is approaching the point where we are more concerned about process and administration than we are about doing high-quality design and engineering and getting high-quality results out. I don't think we are there yet, and I think the trends in that direction are still reversible, but I take
* the relative amount of energy the community seems willing to spend discussing two, essentially trivial, changes to mailing list management, or * the fine details (rather than broad issues) of a process WG charter, or * heated arguments about proposals for which most of the people actively participating in the discussions have clearly not read the relevant documents, or
* IESG being willing to tie up Proposed Standards (or even lower-maturity documents) in order to make sure that all of the grammatical and procedural niceties are adhered to, or
probably several other things that belong on that list...
as symptoms of serious and deep problems with our priorities and how we do business.
For the record, before I'm quoted out of context (as I probably will be anyway), our copying procedures from SDOs that have become much more procedure-bound, so much so that they often appear to no longer care about quality or adoption or interoperability of standards as long as the many procedural rules are followed to the letter and they can report getting more standards out one year than in the previous one would not, IMO, be a good idea ... indeed, it would be closer to the height of stupidity.
To make a distinction that may be useful before you (or someone else) replies, if you (or someone else) wants to get on a tear about NATs, I may or may not agree with you, and I may or may not believe that the flaming the topic tends to generate will result in any real progress or changes in behavior, but at least I'm sure the issue is important to the future of the Internet. Can you say the same for whether the Secretariat and its mailing list machinery adds (or does not add) a few headers to a message or a few characters to a subject line ... assuming they don't _break_ conforming software used in a rational way (e.g., with the robustness principle in mind)? And, if the answer is "no", is there any hope of increasing the ratio of meaningful technical standards work to this sort of debate around here?
regards, john
--On Thursday, 18 December, 2003 09:58 -0500 Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<sarchasm> Maybe we should also rewrite the From header field so that people with dysfunctional MUAs won't have trouble replying to the list?
Maybe we should also rewrite the Reply-to field so that it doesn't matter when people get confused about the difference between reply to author and reply all?
And let's be sure to rewrite the To field so that everyone who uses that field to collate list traffic will get the messages put in the right bin. </sarchasm>
It's taken us ~15 years to get rid of "features" like those mentioned above that well-meaning authors of list software put in to work around lack of user agent functionality. We're still not rid of all of it.
I used to call it "header munging disease" - the idea that if a message passes through an intermediary, there's a strong temptation for the author of that intermediary to consider munging every header field (as well as the message itself) just in case it could somehow be useful to somebody -- never mind that this removes valuable information from the message, and reduces everyone's ability to use the messages to that of the least capable MUA.
Putting [foo] in the subject header is just another example of this trend. Sure, it might be useful to people with dysfunctional MUAs, and there are a lot of those people out there. There were once a lot of people whose MUAs couldn't do "reply all", too.
The short-term solution is to make [foo] an optional feature specified on a per-recipient basis. The long-term solution is to fix the MUAs to recognize and do appropriate things with List-* fields.