On 9 Apr 97 at 8:26, Larry Williamson wrote:
> Some of the lists that I am on put a nice little prefix on the
> subject. This is a great aid when previewing 100 new messages in
> one's inbox in the morning.
>
> Any chance we might be able to institute a similiar feature for
> this list?
Not much. You are up against an ingrained prejudice regarding the
the use of software vs. the human brain. The bulk of the members
of this list are of the school; "never use your brain if you can
get a machine to do it for you...."
Seriously, all kidding aside, I recommend the use of subject list
headers for my list users. Most of their subscribers are using
some flavour of Netscape as a mailer and do not aspire to
installing purpose built local mailer agents. Nor to mastering the
concepts of Boolean logic as applied to mail filtering rules.
On the other hand, some MUA's can really munge up a prefix so that
in some cases you can get:
subject: (MJ) Re: (MJ) List Prefixes Re: (MJ) List Prefixes ...
This tends to be upsetting for some people and an annoyance for
most others.
So the utility of this sort of feature really depends upon the
technical competence of the list membership. Here it would
irritate more people than it would help. On other lists the
reverse could easily be true.
I use mail filtering in Pegasus 2.53 and truly, it is far superior
to eyeballing a hundred or so e-mails by subject. What is
addressed directly to me goes into one folder and everything else
is sorted by origin or destination using the from and to/cc
headers. Consequently, when I am pressed for time I just open the
direct mail folder and reply to those things specifically addressed
to me. When I have the time I quick scan each folder and read the
items that interest me.
Pegasus is FREEWARE and is available from a number of mirror sites
world wide. It includes both UK and US spelling dictionaries and a
wealth of handy little features like multipop calls for those of
us with more than one e-mail account.
Regards,
Jim
---
James B. Byrne Harte & Lyne Limited
vox +1 905 561 1241 9 Brockley Drive
fax +1 905 561 0757 Hamilton, Ontario
ByrneJB@Harte-Lyne.ca Canada L8E 3C3
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