From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 08 2004 - 11:56:49 CDT
Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
> The ones I'm familiar with use the message body rather than the Subject
> field, e.g. the following three:
> with the single word
> unsubscribe
> in the body of the message. This last method assumes that the "From:"
Every mailing list manager that I've investigated that was written in the
last decade supports commands in either the Subject header or a specific
e-mail address instead, since multipart/alternative, unnecessary
base64-encoding, and other problems have made it much harder these days to
extract meaningful commands from the body.
If you want a specific example, see Mailman, which supports commands in
both the subject header and the body and is perhaps the most widely used
mailing list manager these days. (The IETF has recently switched most, if
not all, of their mailing lists over to it, and many other large sites use
it, such as the Free Software Foundation.)
Note that Mailman's subscription confirmation messages also use tokens in
the Subject header to simplify the process of confirming.
Numerous other systems make use of structure in the Subject header. For
example, nearly all help desk systems that I've used that have integral
support for e-mail connect correspondance to an open trouble ticket by
using cookies in the Subject header.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>