[Mailman-Developers] Replybot change proposed

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 5/19/02 10:52 AM, "Barry A. Warsaw" <barry@zope.com> wrote:

> Are there any rfcs or even defacto documents describing the semantics
> of Precedence?  

I believe 822/821 defines its existance, but not its content. The best
defacto definitions for content come from the sendmail definitions, which
everyone else more or less borrows.

Here's the relevant piece from the sendmail operations manual:

      When  the  name is found in a "Precedence:" field, the
      message class is set  to  num.   Higher  numbers  mean
      higher  precedence.   Numbers  less than zero have the
      special property that if an error occurs  during  pro-
      cessing  the body of the message will not be returned;
      this is expected to be used for "bulk"  mail  such  as
      through  mailing  lists.   The  default  precedence is
      zero.  For example, our list of precedences is:

          Pfirst-class=0
          Pspecial-delivery=100
          Plist=-30
          Pbulk=-60
          Pjunk=-100

      People writing mailing list exploders  are  encouraged
      to use "Precedence: list".  Older versions of sendmail
      (which discarded all error returns for negative prece-
      dences)  didn't  recognize  this  name,  giving  it  a
      default precedence of zero.  This  allows  list  main-
      tainers  to see error returns on both old and new ver-
      sions of sendmail.


Note their use of "our list of..."


-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/

Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh
nervously and change the subject.