Re: Summary of Issues Raised to date

On Mar 16 2004, Philip Miller wrote:

> No, I really do mean what I wrote. To be more blunt: there's no reason one 
> person's tags should be visible to any other person. (with the obvious 
> exception of 'tagging collaboration' between them, which we've not yet dealt 
> with; perhaps 'cooperation in labelling' should become a work item?)

But in this case, subject tags are inserted as a hack by certain
filters, to create functionality in a MUA which doesn't exist, and for
which the MUA wasn't built. OE doesn't filter on arbitrary X- headers,
but it does filter on subject contents. So that's why the tag is put
there. 

Now OE doesn't realize there's a tag, and resends the subject 
as-is. This is correct MUA behaviour, unless you want to argue that
copying the subject in a reply is the wrong thing to do for a MUA.

The problem exists now because the filter hacks the MUA, and asking for
the MUA to behave correctly w.r.t. subject tags is asking the MUA
designers to predict the tricks that filter hackers will come up with. 
They'll do it if it becomes a popular behaviour of filters, and then
you still have to wait for users to upgrade their mail clients.

> If spammers hijack a relay trusted by any number of people in an arbitrary 
> role, we have bigger worries than the spammer scanning tags coming through 
> and spoofing them.

Fair enough. There are lots more things that can be done by spammers
at that point. We can probably ignore that angle.

-- 
Laird Breyer.