Re: Summary of Issues Raised to date

Yakov,

There's one issue missing in your list, which came up in the header 
compendium. POPFile also modifies the subject directly, which as I
understand is necessary for filtering in Outlook Express. 
There may be other filters who do this too.

I would think that this practice is a prime candidate for
standardization. Here are some issues with it:

- Spoofed [category] tags. How does a filter deal with them?
- Population explosion of [category] tags. In an email conversation,
  the tags become a nuisance just like Re: Re: Re: ...
- If the tags are modified over an email conversation, or added late
  say, some of the threading algorithms are affected. For example, 
  Jamie Zawinski (http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html) describes a
  robust way of threading, which AFAIK is widely used. However, the
  algorithm sometimes compares subject strings directly to see if the 
  messages belong to a thread. Inserting/removing [category] tags in subjects
  could play havoc with the algorithm.
- The tags can be skipped by the originating algorithm, but
  independent filters have no way of recognizing them (ie the [,]
  markers are much too common in mail subjects)

It's rather distressing now that I've made a list of some of the problems.

-- 
Laird Breyer.