Re: Mail flag "!!"?

Ilgaz Öcal wrote:
On 2006-05-04 15:02:18 +0300, see_signature@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jon) said:

And doesn't mean anything to the mail clientt or server, I think;

The priority stuff is stored in the header of the mail messages and is
set by the sender of the mail. Many IMAP servers support the notion of
flagging messages as, say, important. This is done by the recipient and
can be useful to flagging things in your inbox that you need to get back to.

Some IMAP servers store those flags, of course thanks to spammers,
"priority" is useless and should not be used at all (especially high)

I think that you might be confusing the IMAP flagging (which can only be
done by the end user (or whoever has write permission to the mailbox))
from the "Priority:" header.

Problem is Spammers abused that flag for long time and one of "big
reasons" to get spam score is priority=high itself.

I have found that even "legitimate" use of the priority header has been
worthless. It is most typically used by organizational secretaries
sending out notices that tomorrow is the last day to buy Girl Scout
Cookies or similarly "urgent" matters.

Also note that the "Priority" header is not part of the email standards
(and for good reasons).

Historically there was a use for it, but even that was dodgy. Back in
the days when email travelled by UUCP and the various hosts didn't have
permanent connections to each other (but dialled to their peers when
they felt the need), mail could be marked with one of several
priorities. A particular host could make use of that (say by dialling
its peer host immediately when it had a high priority message to send),
but even then it became clear that enough people couldn't be trusted to
set priorities appropriately, so when SMTP (over IP) came around, the
idea of "priority" was dropped and never included in the standard.

I don't see a mechanism in Mail.app for setting "priority" when
composing a message. So I would be curious about the origin of the
original poster's message.

-j


--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoted or HTML posts
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