Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!exodus!argv From: argv@turnpike.Eng.Sun.COM (Dan Heller) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Procedure for adding headers? Message-ID: <3235@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 21 Nov 90 07:25:22 GMT References: <16502@csli.Stanford.EDU> <1990Nov21.003144.4755@Think.COM> Sender: news@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM Organization: O'Reilly && Associates Lines: 41 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 . > 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 ---------------------------------------------------- O'Reilly && Associates argv@sun.com / argv@ora.com Opinions expressed reflect those of the author only.