dat@hplabs.ARPA (12/18/85)
Chris Kent at Purdue informs me that I missed his contribution to the mail header mania... ---------------- From root Tue Dec 17 10:48:25 1985 To: hpcnou!dat@hplabs.arpa (Dave Taylor) Subject: Re: X-* headers National-Indulgence-Of-The-Day: Lager From: "Christopher A. Kent" <hplabs!cak@Purdue.EDU> Dave, Somehow you've missed my contribution to mail header explosion (see above.) Chris ---------- My response is: Gee you have a wonderful header there. So do some other friends of mine: Phase-of-the-Day: management by objectives Fruit-of-the-Day: apple Buzzword-of-the-Day: user-friendly Mood-of-the-Moment: happy Neuron-Firing-Level: high Libido-Level: very high Weather: sunny with a 30% chance of rain this evening Temperature: 80 degrees, +/- 5 degrees and so on. My real reaction - the arbitrary headers are fine...no biggie...but I'm not about to start adding every random header to the list just to give people vicarious thrills. Y'know what I mean? (Besides, it would increase the size of the list without bounds once I started) If you can get a number of people at a number of different sites to start using your header then it will make it into the document I transmitted since that's the way I decide... While I'm at it, I'd like to poll the readers of this message about their reactions to my posting this list every so often, including all updates, to the newsgroup "net.mail". Any comments? It seems like this would be a pretty useful addition to the net... Sorry to seem so untractable, Chris, but I'd really like to avoid a replay of the header-wars that first hit when people realized they can put just about any random junk in the headers of their outbound messages. My worst nightmare is to start getting messages like: ----------- From root <date> Subject: how about THESE headers! Alternative-Subject: more headers for inclusion in your list Mail-Generated-By: typing it in, of course. From: John Public <john@random_vax> Really-From: God Almost-From: Ronald Reagan Political-Stance-of-the-Day: ban the bomb! Start-Body: Line-1: Dave, Line-2: Line-3: Just thought you'd appreciate this message with it's wonderful Line-4: headers and would consider it for inclusion in your list of Line-5: mail headers... End-Body: Signed: John Q. Public Authorized-by: jqp at 4:50 pm hi ---------- or something equivalent. -- Dave Taylor Hewlett Packard