Re: [tlug] Suggestions for splitting of mails?

[tlug@example.com]

On Tuesday 07 August 2007 07:54:31 Edward Middleton wrote:
> This is something that I looked at before the last tlug election and
> came up with one possible solution.  If people could add some minimal
> tags to their email a la [ANN] [OT] etc. we could provide something more
> useful for filtering.  Something like [QUES], [ANS], [NOOB], [EXPERT],
> [HW], [DRIVER], [IM], [XEMACS], [RUBY], [PYTHON], [PERL], [C&C],
> [LEGAL], [NEWS], [CC], [GPL],.  These could also be used to filter in
> the archive.

I think that tagging emails is a good idea, and I have an idea for a tagging 
system that is quite organized as well as flexible:

Tags are delimitted with the | character, and a space is required before the 
first | character and after the last | character as in the following PCRE:
	/ \|(\w+)\|(?:(\w+)\|)?(?:(\w+)\|)? /

Emails can be tagged with one, two, or three tags.  (Note that each part is 
explicitly written in the regular expression above so that the tag matches 
can be easily extracted.)  The first tag must be from a set of tags that the 
group decides on.  If more than one tag is present, the first should be the 
most general, and the last should be the most specific.

Here are some suggestions of general tags, with explanations:
APP - application related
DEV - development related
DIST - Linux (meta)distribution related
HW - hardware or driver related
JAP - Japanese language related, including fonts, encodings, IMEs, etc.
LUG - email related to this group, such as meeting info
NEWS - news and current events
OT - OTher email, including off topic email
POL - politics related, including licenses
SYS - system (administration) related, general UNIX stuff

Further tags can be specified with more freedom, and I bet that common tags 
will eventually be decided upon naturally.  Here are some examples of how the 
tags would be used with some recent subjects:
Subject: [tlug] |DEV|PYTHON| executing a command that requires root
Subject: [tlug] |APP|FIREFOX| How to use FF's shortcuts
Subject: [tlug] |LUG|LIST| Suggestions for splitting of mails?
Subject: [tlug] |JAP|ENCODING| Email encoding for DoCoMo and AU
Subject: [tlug] |POL|GPL| Apple owns CUPS

Filters could be easily written for these kinds of tags, and the syntax allows 
for some flexibility.  Consider the following example:

The filter /|DEV|/ would match any development related message, including 
both |DEV|PYTHON| and |NEWS|DEV|RUBY|.  The filter / |DEV|/, on the other 
hand, would match the first but not the last, and would therefore be a more 
specific filter to match only messages about development specifically but not 
news about development.

Note that the regular expression above allows for tag names to contain any 
character that can be part of a Perl "word" but my examples used only upper 
case letters.  Do you think that all tag names should be in caps, or is mixed 
case preferable?

What do you think?  What are ways to improve on this system?

Cheers,

Travis