At last a meaningful remark, quoting from below (far below)... > I cannot believe we are even having such a dumbass debate. With apologies, I do not appreciate is the number of individuals who have made observations based on their "personal experience" concerning the SPAM subject. Trading war stories does not contribute to meaningful technical work, and in fact works to the detriment of the IETF. Gene Gaines gene.gaines@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sterling, Virginia USA On Thursday, December 18, 2003, 12:00:37 PM, Mark wrote: > Keith- >> 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. > This is just wrong. > "From" lines and "Reply-to" and whatever are headers that are meant to > be processed by computers. So, you can say all you want about how dumb > MUAs do or do not process these (and how intermediate mail servers > should keep their mits off). Now, humans use these lines, too. So, > call them dual use. > The subject line, on the other hand, is just for people. Sure we can > make programs and filters grok them to classify mail if there is some > standard format (e.g., i-d actions). But, fundementally subject lines > are for humans, not computers. So, comparing subject line munging to > reply-to munging seems to me to pretty much apples and oranges. > You might read the above as supporting your point that we should not add > "[ietf]" to subject lines because subject lines are not for computers > (or "dysfunctional MUAs") to process. However, I think the correct > interpretation is that it is OK for the mail server to add these tags > **and** they may aid the entities that the subject line is actually for > in the first place (humans). Hence, they are fine. > allman > (I cannot actually believe I am sending a non-snide comment in this > thread. Someone should slap me. I read through the whole thread last > night. Every message was dumberer than the previous one (probably > including this one!). I was literally laughing out loud. I cannot > believe we are even having such a dumbass debate. But, it was like a > wreck on the highway and I could not stop rubber-necking. If we have > this much trouble about 6 characters in the subject line then we might > as well forget that problem statement thingy. Really.) --