--On Friday, August 05, 2011 12:45 -0400 Warren Kumari
<warren@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Aug 3, 2011, at 7:21 PM, Richard Kulawiec wrote:
>
>>
>> -1.
>>
>> This list complies with RFC 2919, which alleviates the need
>> for the horrible, unscalable, obsolete, ugly kludge of
>> Subject-line tags. I suggest that anyone who really, *really*
>> wants them on their copies of messages arrange to have them
>> added locally (perhaps by procmail or similar) and not force
>> them on those of us who have chosen mail processing software
>> that correctly uses List-Id.
>
> Still a little confused how this morphed into a religious war
> on RFC 2919 / List-Id. I *did* mention in the original post
> that I had been using List-Id to organize mail -- which would
> lead to folders with a few thousands of unread mails, which I
> would then unceremoniously dump, because it was just too much
> to deal with..
>
> Subject-line tags allow me to just drop everything in the
> inbox and then, at a glance figure out what to read, and in
> what order. I then move the read stuff (and that that I don't
> care about) into separate mailboxes.
Warren,
I don't want to participate in the religious war, partially
because what I do is in the "something else" category. But what
you are describing could easily be modeled, perhaps even more
efficiently, in terms of a search or classification that uses a
combination of List-ID (and maybe even the identified list name)
and the subject line (and maybe other information) in a boolean
or even weighted-score-based search to organize mail. We know
how to do those things -- e.g., they lie at the core of
so-called Bayesian anti-spam procedures.
The problem, religion-independent, is that many of our MUAs
don't provide good capabilities for doing anything like that
because they don't present interfaces for any of compound
boolean search, weighted factor search, effective "like this
one" heuristic search, or successive refinement search --
especially in conjunction with an easy-to-use "take everything
found and either tag it in a special way or put it in a separate
folder" mechanism. Most or all of the bits for some of these
are in the SIEVE collection, but MUAs and servers that are good
at using them and make them easy for users are not widely
available, especially for users who have other requirements
(like good, conforming, IMAP support).
To take the current debate as an example, if a user has to
choose between filtering or organizing mail using List-ID and
using subject lines, something is fundamentally broken
regardless of which choice is made.
Singling you out only because you made the comment, I would
remind you that your employer's public mail system is a major
offender in concentrating on search, rather than folder
management, but not providing sophisticated or iterative
refinement search procedures (nor supporting SIEVE). I would
encourage you to encourage the responsible folks to clean up
their act, both in the interests of those users and to set a
good example for the industry.
john
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