> Several people have told me that they find it difficult to separate
> list traffic from other personal e-mail.
>
> One solution is to preface the subject line in list messages with the
> words "BC-LINUX: ".
>
> Our list isn't moderated so there's no easy way to "enforce" this....
> However, a similar scheme works quite well on one of the other mailing
> lists which I administer. Unless someone has strong objections, I
> suggest that we agree to follow this convention.
Warning: This is a pet peeve of mine so I'm going to rant for a bit.
#ifdef RANTING
It's my opinion that catering to simplistic mail clients that can't
filter mail into different mailboxes is the wrong approach. Isn't it
better to encourage the use of software that isn't effectively broken
rather than inconveniencing uses of real mail clients that can deal
with these issues?
At the moment I'm subscribed to 14 lists, some of which are fairly
high volume, and I use procmail to direct each one to their own
mailbox. If all this traffic were to go to just one mailbox,
regardless of a token prepended to the subject line, it would be very
difficult to live with. So including a token in the subject line is
at best a kludge that helps people on a few low-volume lists, while
taking away from available subject space for those with real mail
clients.
I also wonder about the need for *Linux* users to have to worry about
such stuff.
#endif
There, I feel better now. :-)
We run majordomo here for our list services, so I've done a bit of
digging into it. Majordomo can be set up to prepend some text to the
subject line automatically, while also doing some simple variable
substitution on that text. I haven't fully explored this capability,
but it is there for the list owner to use.
-- Toomas Losin ParaLynx Internet tlo@paralynx.com New Westminster, BC