Earlier today, Eric Thomas responded to Dan Wheeler's suggestion for
a change in error message subject headers by saying:
 
>The  problem is  that  I'm afraid  "KIDCAFE Error"  is  not a  reasonable
>subject line  for normal lists,  and the combined length  would certainly
>exceed your 40 bytes limit.  Your average not-that-long 'From:' field is,
>say,  [log in to unmask]  which is  28  bytes  long, and  the
>significant parts are to the right.
 
     I wonder whether a wording different from the one Dan originally
suggested might address both Dan's concern and Eric's response.  For
example, instead of Dan's suggestion, which was
 
> 4 IN%"[log in to unmask]  4-AUG-1992  KIDCAFE Error From: [log in to unmask]
 
what about the following:
 
> 4 IN%"[log in to unmask]  4-AUG-1992  Error notice from: [log in to unmask]
 
     As the example shows, this omits the wording to which Eric objected
but includes enough of even the longer "mailer-daemon" addresses so that
listowners could usually tell from just the subject header whether this
was a new problem.  It doesn't say which list the message concerns, but my
guess is that that's less important information than whom the message is
from.
 
	Joan Korenman, WMST-L Listowner   KORENMAN@UMBC
	Univ. of MD. Baltimore County     [log in to unmask]
	Baltimore, Maryland 21228-5398