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From: wollman@SADYE.UVM.EDU (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: Another idea for displaying names in captions
Message-ID: <EcCoBsu4lU4LFAjEQb@sadye.uvm.edu>
Date: 23 May 91 04:22:16 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
Lines: 41

Here's another caption idea that I have recently had...

Presently, the caption displays something like the "Real Name" of the
sender of the message; it takes (so far as I can make out) the first
"word", the "initial" of the second "word", and the last "word."  However,
this does not work very well for a number of cases.

  1.  When I receive a message from root, it will be listed as being
from "EMBA C. Facility".  Similarly, messages from MAILER-DAEMON are
listed as being from "Mail D. Subsystem".  I would argue that it would
make a bit of sense for the caption-building code to recognize certain
names which are likely to have non-name "names", and display them as if
no "name" had been specified.  I would suggest in particular that "root,"
"daemon," "MAILER-DAEMON," "uucp," "postmaster," "ftp," and "SYSTEM" all
should receive this treatment.

  2.  Sometimes, especially in a mailing list like Info-Nets, I receive
messages from people who have lots of miscellaneous junk in their
"names."  I would propose that the following happen (maybe some of them
already do?):

 Everything after a comma is ignored.
 Any "word" which is numeric (ignoring punctuation) is ignored.

This won't always help (for example, Ric Nauen's name comes over as
"1159-DIRECTOR/OVERSEAS OPS" but then he's from a militar system
anyway).  But, it might make things a bit nicer to use.

[I'd still like to see someone deal with % and ! addresses in a
sensible manner--assuming a well-defined meaning can be worked out.
However, it is fairly obviously that the Argentinian posters on
Info-Nets are *not* employees of Thinking Machines, Incorporated.
Similarly, many BITNET posters appear to be coming from CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU;
I know that this is not the case, but that might not be so for a
new user.]

I would like to say, though, that I think the "name" feature in general
is quite nice; if only people would stop putting extraneous junk in
their From: fields.

-GAWollman