At 12:29 PM 2/25/97 +0100, Eric Thomas wrote:

>Actually, this  kind of behaviour  is called  a "design choice".  You can
>make a case  for doing it one way,  and you can make a case  for doing it
>the  other way  ("Hey, I  never put  NO SUBJECT  in my  message!") I  was
>waiting to see how many people agreed/disagreed.

It *can* be a design choice, or it can be something overlooked.  I've
overlooked a thing or two in the past myself  ;-)

It just struck me that I couldn't see any reason for the particular choice,
since people *will* use SUBJECTHDR to sort on, and the subjectless
message is (fortunately) a rarely-seen bird.  (I still can't see why
anyone would want to have SUBJECTHDR apply to everything except subjectless
messages -- it applies not to what you send, but to what you receive.
I too never send NO SUBJECT messages, but I do receive them.)

I suspect that feedback here will be very light, because most on this list
probably already have had other filtering schemes in effect for their own
mail, SUBJECTHDR doesn't exist on 1.8b lists (including this one), and most
subscribers who could now use it aren't even aware of it yet (and thus
haven't asked their friendly list-owner about it).

>Likewise, I tend to have more  respect for suggestions coming from people
>who don't scream  BUG at the first opportunity and  who don't assume that
>LISTSERV developers are a bunch of  idiots whose main concern is to avoid
>admitting that they may have forgotten to write 2 lines of code.

Please accept my apologies for the wording (though "idiots" is your word,
not mine).  I guess I deserved that.

Will you accept "feature not performing as a user would likely expect"
as a replacement for "bug"?  (Harder to type though  :-)

Cheers,
Stan