Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!news.cs.indiana.edu!spool.mu.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Another idea for displaying names in captions Message-ID: Date: 23 May 91 13:29:39 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 17 The code that tries to extract the real human name from the "From" field is, inevitably, a set of heuristics. We tuned them for quite a while, and then moved on to other things. What it is good at, therefore, inevitably reflects the range of From: fields we were seeing at CMU circa 1987. It isn't surprising if what you're seeing at UVM in 1991 is different, or that our heuristics are not adequate for all those cases. In general, I found it a tiring and losing effort to constantly update those heuristics, so eventually I just stopped. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a standard header for "Sender-Real-Name" that everyone used? In the absence of such a standard, though, we have heuristics. The code that implements the heuristics is pretty straightforward, and can be found in ams/libs/ms/prettyn.c. I would encourage anyone who cares enough & has the energy to go fiddle with that file. In a sense, you can't really do any harm, since all you can do is alter the set of things that show up on the caption -- it isn't like you could cause mail to vanish or anything....