[Mailman-Developers] Re: Please stop the cross posting

J C Lawrence claw@under.engr.sgi.com
Fri, 29 Jan 1999 14:40:10 -0800


On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 12:59:02 -0500 (EST) 
Ken Manheimer<ken@digicool.com> wrote:

> (Proper handling of the subject line prefix was one of the first
> things i did - i'm pretty sure it was before 1.0b3, maybe 1.0b1.
> If i recall correctly, i implemented a slightly more stringent
> strategy, only looking for the prefix early on in the subject
> line, after "re:"'s, but before other text.  I know it takes care
> of the vast majority of cases, and i suspect it's preferable more
> of the time in offbeat cases than looking for the prefix anywhere
> in the subject line, but i may be wrong.  

There are three common caxes:

  1) User thinks he's being helpful and prepends his own tag.

  2) Tag comes at start of Subject: or after some Re: or Fwd
variation.

  3) Tag occurs one or more times in Subject body due to hand edited
subject (eg: Subject: XXX (was [tag] YYY)

#1 is ignorable.

#2 is slightly painful in the variations.  eg Notes uses a "Re:
#ddd" where the ddd's are a digital count of the number of replies
made from Notes.

#3 needs to be checked for and the (potentially multiple) instances
of the tag need to be stripped

I spent a while writing C code to do all of this (except for the
Notes thing -- that's on the bug list), and can provide code samples
as needed.

-- 
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw@kanga.nu
(Contractor)                             Internet: coder@kanga.nu
---------(*)                    Internet: claw@under.engr.sgi.com
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...