list subject

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday 11 December 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Just the opposite - everyone else is fully equal and capable of
> defending the way they prefer things.  But, nearly every other list I
> subscribe to is polite enough to identify itself with a tag and I don't
> recall ever seeing anyone complain about it - _ever_.  And since I deal
> regularly with both, I have no question about which I prefer.

You must not be on too many mailing lists.  In my experience, after having 
been subscribed to, at the peak, of nearly a hundred and fifty separate lists 
(I'm only on about fifty now, spread across six e-mail accounts), I have seen 
the proportion about evenly split.  But this is the same as the 'Reply-to:' 
versus no 'Reply-to:' split; about 50-50.

And I have seen people complain about list subject munging before.

It's up to the list administrators to set this policy; griping to the list in 
general is not going to change their minds, so you might as well not try (if 
you must gripe, gripe to fedora-list-owner at redhat.com).  

The easy thing to do is to use the standard RFC822 (and superceding RFC's) 
List-Id: header to do your processing.  With the e-mail volume I pull, having 
everything coming into a single folder is impossible (I got over 16,000 
non-spam e-mails last month from this one account (I have six)); I organize 
by folders, and kmail allows some really slick presentation of those folders, 
and does the automatic List-Id based filing.

Incidentally, awstats tells me the Fedora-List delivered to me over 5,000 
e-mails in November; that's nearly one third of my e-mail on this account 
last month.  Hmm, pretty bad signal to noise ratio on that list, since I've 
only left 2600 or so messages in the folder since I resubscribed (after a few 
years absence; I unsubscribed after I got tired of arguing for what is now 
yum-presto) in September.  And I'm getting ready to clean it out; the archive 
will likely be left with less than 1,000 messages that have enough meat to be 
considered worthy of keeping around. 

And if anyone is interested in getting awstats running on your e-mail server, 
and producing e-mail stats (at least under sendmail), I can try to give you a 
pointer or two; it is pretty slick to see what you really get.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu