Hi Spike,

Friday, February 28, 2003, 4:33:24 PM, you wrote:

> The issue is the ability to modify something someone wrote in a way
> they never intended.

I would say that this is not always the case. In most cases I want to
modify incoming message the reason is that the message is already
modified and I just want to `restore' it to the state it was before that
modification. Why was it modified in the first place? The most frequent
source of such modifications -- for me -- is some kinds of mail
filtering proxies and/or applications. Take, for example, perfect in all
other aspects, despammed.com service. This is a SPAM filtering mail
forwarding service. It adds `[despammed]' tag to the subject of any mail
which have passed through that system. Well, actually that means that
when I receive the message it is no identical to the `original' one.

Why do you think an author of the message would mind if I'll strip that
`[despammed]' tag?

Of course if that would be the only despammed.com who adds its own tags,
the problem would ceased to exist since I could contact despammed.com
developers and ask them to provide an option to turn that behavior off.
But this is so common to mail-lists, forum mail engines etc. to supply
all kinds of the tags, that it is rather impractical to insist on
modifying all of them. I think it is much more productive to adjust my
own mail software for that purpose.

Of course if it is possible to hack The Bat! up so that for every mail
satisfying given criteria it would:

1) Export the message to external file.
2) Invoke the script provided passing the file exported.
3) Import the modified (or should I rather say `restored') mail back,
   replacing the `original' message.

Well, I don't see any difference then except for some extra steps
required compared to accomplishing the same task with imaginary
built-in support.

-- 
Pavel Kuznetsov


________________________________________________
Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information:
http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html

Reply via email to