🚀 go-pugleaf

In article barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
> >And has anyone thought of adding a Priority: {High, Middle, Low} to
> >the list, with Low messages being the Madonna mailing list; Middle
> >being regularly scheduled meetings; High being time-sensitive, more
> >urgent information (and so forth)?

> Adding a header field is almost certainly not enough.

RFC822 (I think) specifies the Precedence: header that can be set to
things like "junk" to indicate that if the mail can't be delivered,
drop it on the floor (don't bother sending a mailer daemon).  There
are other values that are used to indicate high-volume mailing lists
and things, but these are rarely used (in fact, all I've ever seen
is "junk" :-).  Admittedly, I should know more about this <gulp>.

> Mail transfer
> programs generally are not required to look at the header of the messages
> they are transfering.
That's rather sweeping, but I know what you mean.  MTAs -are- required
to look at and even change certain headers under certain circumstances.


BTW, just FYI: The latest Mush has a "Priority" header specification
that you can set yourself.  Typically, this is used on your own messages
(you can set five different priorities for messages); once done, you
can sort by them and do other actions based on message priority.
A particular organization can have a admin-based Mushrc file that
does the same thing for "priority" mail and, provided everyone is
using Mush, people can send messages around with varying priorities
and (hopefully) the right thing will happen.

We didn't specify anything more explicit with priorities in Mush
since it's new.  We want to give people the chance to play with them
for a while before establishing any sort of defined action.  But,
remember, this is just on the MUA side and does not (and is not
intended to) have anything to do with the MTA.
--
dan
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