On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 07:00:29AM +0200, Martin Rex wrote: > With subject_prefix I can quite easily tell apart discussions from several > IETF mailing lists, and it works with _every_ MUA with default settings. The fact that poor, broken, obsolete, or non-standards-compliant MUAs exist is not a valid reason for inflicting a fundamentally-broken kludge on the people who have chosen their MUAs with care. And actually, no, you can't *always* tell those discussion apart, nor can you tell them from off-list replies...because (a) discussions which cross multiple lists may carry the subject-line tags from each list and (b) off-list replies will also -- unless someone takes the time to hand-edit the Subject line and remove the tag or mark it [off-list] -- carry the tag. This is one of the many reasons why List-Id is vastly superior: it solves both these problems. For example, consider these exquisite little inconveniences (chosen from thousands of examples on hand): Subject: Re: [asterisk-security] [asterisk-dev] dahdi system.conf update Subject: [WEB SECURITY] [HITB-Announce] HITB2011AMS Conference Materials Subject: [opensuse-project] Re: [opensuse-testing] Re: [opensuse-factory] Request to change MS6 I like the last one particularly: as the conversation thread migrated, the subject-line tags managed to gradually colonize the entire Subject line, thereby obliviating the actual Subject. (Yes, incidentally, I suppose you could set up your MUA to honor the leftmost tag, but that does nothing to solve problem (b) above or any of the other I haven't bothered to enumerate, and anyway if your MUA is that smart...then you could just use List-Id.) And I haven't even gotten into all the circumstances where [.*] appears on a Subject line and has nothing to do with the mailing list's name. ---rsk _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf