P3D P3D/S3D Message formatting

[Bob Wier <wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

|Bob (Weir)
|
|Can you comment on the shifting of the "P3D" (and "S3D")
|identifiers from the sender field to the subject field
|(in most recent cases ... some messages are still using
|the old format)?
|
|It's playing havoc with sorting in my mail readers. (I can
|fix it but I would like to know what the final intent is).
| 
|-- 
|    ... Sid (sid@xxxxxxxxxx)

HI Sid - (and others). This is (I hope) the final format. 
Recently a number of ISP's have been interpreting the rules for
e-mail addresses very liberally, and listproc isn't up to handling
them. What finally blew it out of the water was an address like
"My Name"@big.net - Listproc most emphatically cannot handle 
embedded blanks, even within quote marks. The only way to 
handle these kinds of addresses would be to hand off address
parsing to an external, full size address parser (I have one
in PERL). The problem there is that if every address has to run
thru the external parser, it would kill the response of the
machine.

So the easiest thing to do is to shift the ID from the sender
field to the Subject field and not mess around with the e-mail
address. This is about a 2 line modification, so
it's not prohibitive in terms of machine cycles.

The problem we are likely to see is that if everyone just hits 
"reply" to answer a message, we will end up with something like
RE: P3D RE:P3D RE:P3D  etc etc on the subject line. I may write
another simple filter to strip out multiple REs, but in the meantime,
everyone should be careful to edit their subject lines (which is
good advice anyway - change the subject if a topic thread drifts
significantly away from the original message).

Most of the bobcat site messages should now have washed out of the system,
so you should all be seeing the new format. Additionally, mail sent
to photo-3d@xxxxxx will be forwarded on to here for the time being, but
it would be best to change the address everybody uses to

photo-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

so as not to run into service interruptions (like yesterday - bobcat
was unreachable most of Sunday - strangely enough connectivity out here
in Montana seems better than it was 60 miles from Dallas).

I *could* put the identifier at the END of the subject message, but right
offhand I can't see any reason to do that, and it might cause problems for
people with narrow subject fields on their mail readers.

THANKS

               Bob Wier
         mailto:wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  12:40 PM  Monday, November 10, 1997
     Rocky Mountain College, Billings MT.
 keeper of the Photo-3d and Overland-Trails
mailing lists and the USA GPS Waypoint server 



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