Re: About egcs mailing lists

[Todd Vierling <tv at pobox dot com>]

On Thu, 5 Mar 1998, Olivier Galibert wrote:

: > What do you think?
: 
: Do filtering on "Sender", not "To".

: Subject munging sucks[1].

Since these are _egcs_ lists, I think that this is adequate as the users
should be knowledgeable enough, but I run lists where subject munging is a
necessity for the inexperienced or Nutscrape-mail users.  I can see people
requesting such a facility.

: [1] It often kills pseudo-threading.

Not if you munge correctly.  In fact, I have a script based on Petidomo's
"InsertNameInSubject.sh" that does the following: 

- strips any existing [LISTNAME] tag
- changes "Sv: ", "RE: ", "re:", "Aw: ", "Re[#]: ", and the suffix " -Reply"
  to a prefix "Re: ".  (Have I missed any less common ones?) 
- Merges multiple Re:'s into a single "Re: ".
- Places the [LISTNAME] tag at the beginning of the subject, unless there
  is a "Re: ", in which case it goes immediately after that.
- If no Subject: header is found, creates a default one of
  "Subject: [LISTNAME] (no subject)".

Voila, perfect pseudo threading (even better than non-munged subjects) and a
subject line tag.  And yes, I'll send the script to anyone upon request; 
it's based on sed (not perl) for speed.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)