July 23, 2003
List header metadata
There's an established standard for mailing lists and how they're supposed to announce their presense in messages. RFC2369 covers it. This article covers it in a little more accessible manner.
Ok, so why bother? It makes it easier for your mail program to see if it's from a mailing list or not. Yes, it's one of those little things that only helps the machines figure things out. But by making it accessible to the machines in a predictable way it becomes possible for them to pull of some Wizard of Oz-like behind-the-curtain magic. Messages with these headers can be automatically grouped into folders or redirected to a different mailbox perhaps.
Do the mailing lists you read use them?
Most, but not all, of the lists I read use them. There's only a couple either without them or with goofy ones that I just haven't worked out procmail recipies for yet. I've got it down to four seperate recipies in my .procmailrc file to catch all of the different types (though I may as well just OR them all together).
Posted by: David Raynes on July 23, 2003 04:23 PM
