On Sun, 6 Apr 1997 14:03:24 -0400, John Witherspoon <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>1) It would be great if the Listserv software could filter and reject any
>message with no subject or a subject of: ABCLIST-L Digest - 3 Apr 1997 to 4
>Apr 1997.

Not likely this will happen since a Subject: is not required.  A recent
(and welcome to my thinking) modification to LISTSERV is that if you have
SET SubjectHdr, the list tag will be added to an otherwise blank subject
line, so those of us who rely on this for sorting inbound mail can still
do so.

As to the Digest subject, I have mixed feelings.  We all wish for
software/hardware to filter annoying things from us, but people who leave
the Digest subject line, either have a primitive mailer which they can't
change, or they are too new to things electronic to realize this is a
mistake.  In either case, the only solution (and opportunity) is education
of the user.

>2) It would also be nice if the software could reject messages in which the
>number of quoted lines of text (as determined by their starting with the >
>character) exceeded a certain percentage of the number of new response lines
>of text in a subsequent message.

This is common in news processing, but is normally a function of the mail
handler, rather than the news reader/composer.  Again, I think education
is the answer.  Also, there are people with special needs (e.g. brain
disfunction of various sorts) who need to be reminded of the context of
msgs, since they are unable to provide this through their own memory.
Many useful support groups have sprung up that would otherwise be
impossible if this function existed (and could not be turned off).

--
 ________________________________________________________________________
 Ben Parker ............ (Oak Park IL) .......... [log in to unmask]