[Mailman-Developers] Using bracketed prefixes in subject as filters

[Gordon P. Hemsley]

I filed a request for enhancement about using bracketed prefixes in
subjects as filters:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/1082495

Barry mentioned that I should raise the issue with regard to the dlist
discussion, I presume because my proposal overlaps and/or conflicts
with it.

However, the only things I know about what a "dlist" even is has been
garnered from skimming the four messages on the topic in the archive,
and it's not clear to me they my idea is necessarily compatible with
dlists. (They seem to be exclusive proposals that may handle the same
usecase.)

I've only just subscribed to this list to participate in this
discussion, and my knowledge of the inner workings of mailman is
fairly limited.

But I present to you the contents of the RFE I filed, in order to
facilitate discussion:

===========

Many large mailing lists use bracketed prefixes in subjects as a way
to filter messages into smaller buckets, allowing some subscribers to
read all mail sent to the list while allowing others to filter
messages (in their mail client) to read only the messages they are
interested in.

For example, the W3C's www-style mailing list uses these tags to
filter messages based on which CSS spec they refer to. Thus, a subject
line that begins "[css3-fonts]" will be assumed to be about only the
css3-fonts spec, with a target audience of only those interested in
that particular spec and not, say, the css3-flexbox spec (whose
subject lines would be prefixed with "[css3-flexbox]").

To handle this, the Mailman archive interface would provide an option
to filter only on particular prefixes (as well as messages that don't
have any prefixes), allowing a user of the archive to use it as they
otherwise would, but filtering the output such that they only see the
messages they want to see, instead of the whole archive.

In addition, it would be helpful to allow mailing lists to
automatically prefix subject lines when the message is sent to an
e-mail address using a plus alias.

For example, sending mail to www-style+css3-fonts at w3.org would prefix
the subject line of the message with "[css3-fonts]" in the message
sent to subscribers and in the archive, whereas sending mail to
www-style+css3-flexbox at w3.org would prefix the message with
"[css3-flexbox]".

It should also be allowed to have multiple prefixes on a message, and
having such messages be treated as if they had any prefix
individually. In terms of plus aliasing, there are two ways to handle
it: (1) allow aliases to specify multiple prefixes in a plus alias
using some separator (e.g. a comma:
www-style+css3-fonts,css3-flexbox at w3.org); or (2) detecting and
intercepting when a single message was sent to multiple e-mail
addresses with different plus aliases for a single mailing list (e.g.
sending the same e-mail to both www-style+css3-fonts at w3.org and
www-style+css3-flexbox at w3.org), treating it as a single message with
multiple subject prefixes when sent to subscribers or stored in the
archive.

Now, I understand that this is likely a huge undertaking, but I think
it would go a long way to helping users with large and diverse mailing
lists.

[EDIT: It appears the W3C may not actually use Mailman. But my point
is still the same, so take my usage of W3C e-mails as a hypothetical
example, if necessary.]

===========

(My first thinking on the matter arose when dealing with the WHATWG
mailing list, which I know uses Mailman. I don't subscribe to any W3C
mailing lists right now, so I didn't realize that W3C may not use
Mailman; it was only my use of the W3C archives that prompted me to
file my original idea as a Mailman RFE.)

Regards,
Gordon

-- 
Gordon P. Hemsley
me at gphemsley.org
http://gphemsley.org/ • http://gphemsley.org/blog/