Well, if you open the horse's mouth, and look at the teeth, you'll note that there are two commonly used headers: X-MS-Priority: <text> and X-Priority: <number>. The former was of course invented by MS. The latter was invented much earlier, when mail actually went from one machine to another to get cross-country, sometimes on dial-up uucp links. And it was intended to priortize the transmission of mail, therefore more for the use of the MTA's than the users. In particular, X-Priority: 5 was used to indicate mail that had long lead times (like announcing a conference 6 months in advance). This mail could obviously be saved until the wee hours of the morning, when long-distance calls were cheaper. X-Priority: 1 was intended for extremely urgent mail, usually having to do with network conditions, and generally sent between sysadmins. The net was so different then, no one would dream of setting a bogus priority that was inappropriate for the real urgency of a message.At 08:16 12/16/2003, you wrote:
On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 04:40, T. Ribbrock wrote:
> Point is, that flag is non-standard, which means you cannot rely on the
> recipient seeing it anyway. And even if he does see it, he might very
> well ignore it, as so many spammers use it as well.
I believe this flag with outlook was created and expected to work for users within a company/network, not in general with POP clients
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall using priorities in Eudora back in 1995, well before Outlook was even created.
Most things were not invented by MS, contrary to what they'd like you to believe... <grin>
And they aren't really NON-standard. All headers beginning with "X-" are allowed specifically by the standard, with the usage and semantics to be agreed upon by the community involved. That's why when MS wanted a *user-to-user* indicator of priority, they avoided the earlier X-Priority: header and set up a distinct one for their own "community" of Outlook users.
-- Fritz Whittington TI Alum - http://www.tialumni.org
