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Re: [AT-L] Re: [AT-L] Re: [AT-L]


Hello All -

I sat down to my trusty Mac the other day to catch up on a few day's worth
of email.  I opened up my AT-L mailbox and noticed that the "new"
mailserver software has created an interesting challenge for me.

The good news was that there were plenty of interesting AT-L messages to
read (the weather must be too hot for hiking <g>).

The bad news was that a majority of the messages had subject fields that
were completely useless in helping me identify a particular thread to
follow.  All they said was:

               Subject: [AT-L] Re: [AT-L] Re: [AT-L] Re: [AT-L] Re:

Apparently the mailserver now automagically adds a "[AT-L]" to the subject
field.  Many of our email SW packages automagically add a "Re:" to the
existing subject field when we hit the Reply button (or whatever
contortions you PC types have to go thru...<g>).

All this email magic is adding a bunch of meaningless characters to the
subject field that quickly pushes any useful info off the right hand side
into never never land.  Am I the only one having this problem?

I have always been able to see that a given message is from AT-L by simply
looking at the "From:" field (From: at-l@patsy.hack.net), so I don't need
to have the "[AT-L]" appended to the Subject field to help identify where
the mail is coming from.  I use Eudora Pro and have taught it to look at
the "From:" field and stick incoming AT-L messages into a special mailbox.
I display a list of all incoming messages that includes the "From:" and
"Subject:" fields.  I tend to let messages accumulate for a few days and
then read thru them one thread at a time.  Unfortunately, this is a little
hard to do without meaningful information in the "Subject:" field.  I don't
even want to think what a "sort by thread" feature would do with all
this...

Do enough folks on the list need the "[AT-L]" in the Subject field to
justify the loss of useful information?  Would it mess anybody up if we
just killed the "[AT-L]" and went back to the "way it was in the good old
days..." <VBG>.  Can we?

If any of you '97 thru-hikers are planning to carry a laptop on your hike,
you might want to consider joining in on the "[AT-L] Removal Crusade"...I
bet that I deleted AT LEAST TWO POUNDS of superfluous [AT-L]'s the other
day...


y'all come,
            Charlie II

charlie2@ro.com    Huntsville,Al