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Brad, >>Actually, no. Fidonet. Over two decades ago and before Microsoft woke > FidoNet parcelled things up with no need for the user to filter stuff > into different folders. Only as the transport medium. I was tunnelling internet email and usenet via FTN into the UK along with international echos and netmail for some time, and wrote a chunk of software to handle such things beyond the UUCP gateways. Filtering and gating by subject, echotag, newsgroup and many other methods happened - and sorting into folders (in and out of email and netmail too) relied heavily on filtering, and subject tags were the universal glue supported by all clients and technologies. Sometimes stripped before emerging, sometimes not. > My beef with subject tags is that they waste space. Even in this day > and age, subject header space is a finite resource which is better used > as a subject, not a a tag holder for filtering. I've been on mailing Wow. Just, wow. > lists with ridiculously long tags (12+ chars). Thankfully, my MUA has > the ability to filter them out, meaning I get to read more of the > subject line allowing me to make a better informed choice before I open > the message. Fine. There is a 78 char "soft" limit on subject lines, and a 998 char "hard" limit, as far as I've been able to determine. Caring about a few chars in square brackets at the start of the subject line is a bit daft, imo. But as your client can filter them, fine - struggling to understand why you want them gone if they don't impact on your subject-browsing pleasure. > Then there's the fact that more and more people are moving to a tablet > or smart phone for their internet access (getting their mail, etc). > Wasting screen space on a tag is detrimental to that experience. It's up to the client to change how things are displayed to fit. I don't use a tablet so the extra six characters this tag takes makes zero difference to me and I don't want things dumbed or changed to suit any one particular way of viewing things. I do read this list via my phone's gmail app on occasion, but not once have I struggled to understand the topic. If new systems don't suit established technology. they need to find a way around it. If you were to succeed in removing tags from mailman and other list software, what about people who DON'T filter? The messages appear in their inbox and it's a lot easier to identify them by tag - and lists DO need to be treated different by the user or we end up with normal email behavior. Top posting, quoting everything - things that annoyed me back in FTN days but now don't, because they're endemic. Fortunately the clue level here is such that most everyone quotes and posts in a non-wasteful way. Tags aren't going anywhere though. You're fully entitled to be as grumpy as you like, but this is going to last as long as mailing lists and email so you're going to be grumpy for a while. >>to be elitest and superior about something, choose something better >>than a massively inefficient 7-bit transport system > The transport mechanism is completely irrelevant. Inefficiency is never irrelevant. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq