You can flag received messages that are important to you. What you want is the sender to determine how important messages are for the recipient. Let the recipient choose. They can use the powers of most mail clients to help them organize messages to sort their mail. Don't assume the sender has that right.
Oh, for Pete's sake!
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This is not about "choice" or anyone's "right" to determine anything... and by flagging a message as Important when I send it I am not forcing anyone to do anything. Jeez... sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Mail clients that allow me (a.k.a. "the sender") to flag a message with higher priority give me the convenience of indicating to the recipient that this message is, for some reason, of a higher priority TO ME. Period, end of story, no political, libertarian, or totalitarian subtleties. I can just as well write "urgent" on the outside of a paper envelope.
Does this force the recipient to comply, give it special treatment, or even acknowledge such a flag? Not at all. He/she can disregard it entirely if desired. Or the recipient can actually pay some attention if, IN HIS OPINION, a message that I consider urgent is to be treated differently from other mail in any way. A case in point: when I send emails to my subordinates, I assure you that they care about which messages I think deserve a quicker response. Then again, other recipients may not give a damn.
And yes, when I receive messages, I _would_ like to know if the sender considers a particular message to be more important than others. I may or may not do anything about it, depending on who the sender is and how my workload is, but I would like to know.
Removing or omitting the ability to mark sent messages with higher or lower priority is NOT a good thing. It removes choice, which you so fervently espouse. Having that choice does not force anything upon the recipient. Evolution is going to lose points with most corporate users, and many other folks, for not having this. Why-oh-why would this become an issue of rights and choice? Good grief!
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-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
