Date   : Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:48:22 -0500
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: test of bbc-micro-outgoing address was

Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
>> Message-ID: <453E4F0D.1090108@...>
>  
> Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...> wrote:
>> James Lampard wrote:
>>> I suspect the lack of [BBC-Micro] in the Subject is
>>> causing it to be dumped into peoples Inboxes rather
>>> that their BBC-Micro folder and causing it to be
>>> missed.
>> You're kidding, right? Are there really people out there who rely on a
> certain
>> composition of subject line to filter messages, rather than simply going by
>> the list address and filtering on that?
>  
> Not composition, but tags, yes, and not to filter, but to sort,
> yes, I do. All my mail is saved in a directory named from whatever
> characters appear between [ and ] at the start of a subject line.
> Anything else gets saved in a directory called 'MAIL'.
>  
> Even at work where I have to use Outlook I also do that. That's
> the whole point of configuring mailing lists to insert [xxx] tags,
> to allow the recipients to do things with them.

Eh? I'm missing something. How does performing actions based on the subject 
line differ from performing actions based upon other stuff in the header 
(including sender or reply-to)?

I can't think of a single mail client that lets you do something based upon 
subject line, but doesn't let you do something based on other fields (sure, 
there are ancient clients around which can't do *any* filtering on subject or 
other fields, but from you're message you're not considering them any more 
than I am)

All the subject line tag achieves is to  waste subject line space without 
actually adding any useful functionality for people using mail clients that 
allow filtering. It's a technique which seems to have taken root only in 
recent years as mailing lists have become more popular - I suspect because a 
lot of the recent explosion in available lists are populated by non-technical 
people who didn't have a clue how to set up their email clients properly.

If I really wanted to add [BBC-Micro] to every list message for some reason I 
could do that via a client-side rule; it's always easier to add information 
than it is to take information already added away again.

cheers

Jules