On Aug 11, 2011, at 12:26 PM, Barry Leiba wrote: >> List-Id: is only useful for folks who have either lots of time on >> their hands, or want to use automatic archival and have no desire >> to actually process the email they're receiving. > ... >> I'm a simple human being that can focus his mind and his eyesight >> only on one single thing at a time, so everything has to be serialized >> anyway, and no amount of slicing and dicing the stuff will reduce >> the amount of processing -- but most of it will incur additional actions >> to open it when it is not queued in a single inbox. > > Martin, please don't assume that everyone deals with their email the > way you do. I sort my mail using List-ID header fields, each list's > messages go into a separate mailbox (organized much the way Richard > Kulawiec suggests), and I find it *fabulously* useful and efficient. > Still, I would never suggest that you had to do it that way, nor that > your way isn't useful. Your way isn't useful FOR ME. Apparently, my > way isn't useful FOR YOU. À chacun, son goût, after all. Something that I've observed for many years is that people really don't like to change the tools and practices that they have used regularly and for a long time, even when new tools and/or practices are more functional. (It turns out that I'm the same way. Back in the winter of 1980 I ported James Gosling's Emacs to VMS. I haven't used Gosling Emacs since circa 1985, but I'm still using Gosling's key bindings. I've ported those key bindings to every editor I've used since then. I programmed almost exclusively in C between 1980 and 2009 or so, at which point I started learning Python and now write most of my code in it. I have no regrets about learning Python, but I also have no regrets at sticking with C for so long. Even though GUI interfaces have long since become commonplace on desktops, the application that I use most is still a terminal emulator as an interface to bash. And I'd still be using MH to read my mail if it had decent IMAP support.) So if people want to stick with mail user agents that don't recognize List-ID, if they want to have all of their mail end up in one mailbox, if they want to use "sort by subject" to classify their incoming mail - I don't blame them. Sure there are better tools these days, but it's understandable if they are hesitant to invest the time required to evaluate and learn new tools and new ways of handling mail, and potentially disrupt their ability to communicate while doing so. Munging the subject field of mailing list traffic is really ugly, but many people have long-entrenched work habits that rely on it. I don't think that existing lists should change their behavior, and I certainly don't think it should be the default behavior for new lists, but I would like to see it be a subscriber option for new lists. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf