two gripes about Evolution ...

[Fritz Whittington]

On or about 2003-12-16 09:08, Rodolfo J. Paiz whipped out a trusty #2 
pencil and scribbled:

> At 08:16 12/16/2003, you wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 04:40, T. Ribbrock wrote:
>>
>> > Point is, that flag is non-standard, which means you cannot rely on 
>> the
>> > recipient seeing it anyway. And even if he does see it, he might very
>> > well ignore it, as so many spammers use it as well.
>>
>> I believe this flag with outlook was created and expected to work for
>> users within a company/network, not in general with POP clients
>
>
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall using priorities in 
> Eudora back in 1995, well before Outlook was even created.
>
> Most things were not invented by MS, contrary to what they'd like you 
> to believe... <grin>
>
>
Well, if you open the horse's mouth, and look at the teeth, you'll note 
that there are two commonly used headers: X-MS-Priority: <text> and 
X-Priority: <number>.  The former was of course invented by MS.  The 
latter was invented much earlier, when mail actually went from one 
machine to another to get cross-country, sometimes on dial-up uucp 
links.  And it was intended to priortize the transmission of mail, 
therefore more for the use of the MTA's than the users.  In particular, 
X-Priority: 5 was used to indicate mail that had long lead times (like 
announcing a conference 6 months in advance).  This mail could obviously 
be saved until the wee hours of the morning, when long-distance calls 
were cheaper.  X-Priority: 1 was intended for extremely urgent mail, 
usually having to do with network conditions, and generally sent between 
sysadmins.  The net was so different then, no one would dream of setting 
a bogus priority that was inappropriate for the real urgency of a message.

And they aren't really NON-standard.  All headers beginning with "X-" 
are allowed specifically by the standard, with the usage and semantics 
to be agreed upon by the community involved.  That's why when MS wanted 
a *user-to-user* indicator of priority, they avoided the earlier 
X-Priority: header and set up a distinct one for their own "community" 
of Outlook users. 

-- 
Fritz Whittington
TI Alum - http://www.tialumni.org