[SLUG] Fun with message headers

From: Ian Blenke (icblenke@nks.net)
Date: Sun Mar 12 2006 - 17:07:09 EST

At the TBAD meeting, we had a brief discussion about email that somehow
devolved into "mean email tricks".

It started with someone commenting on how I looked like my email
picture. Every message I send from Thunderbird on my Powerbook has a
small photo of me embedded in the sent message headers using the
MessageFace extension:

    
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=thunderbird&id=393

Matt Moen mentioned a header line that irritates Outlook users with a
popup box. Looking through google for the X-Message-Flag that Matt uses,
I found the following:

   http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MicrosoftOutlookExpress

which suggests the following three headers:

 X-Message-Flag: OUTLOOK ERROR: Use a real Mail client, like Mozilla
Thunderbird.
 Reply-By: Wed, 1 Apr 2000 12:00:00 -0500
 X-WebTV-Stationery: Standard; BGColor=black; TextColor?=black

"The WebTV Stationery header hides the message in WebTV clients. The
Reply-By header sets an angry "OVERDUE MESSAGE!!" flag. The Message Flag
header puts another flag by your message, and also displays your custom
notice."

Googling a bit more, MozillaZine has a nice HowTo for setting headers
automagically with Thunderbird 1.5:

    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers

So, for "id1", I can add the above customer header lines simply by
adding the following lines to my user.js in my user profile:
 
    user_pref("mail.identity.id1.headers", "messageflag, replyby,
webtvstationery");
    user_pref("mail.identity.id1.header.messageflag", "X-Message-Flag:
OUTLOOK ERROR: Use a real Mail client, like Mozilla Thunderbird.");
    user_pref("mail.identity.id1.header.replyby", "Reply-By: Wed, 1 Apr
2000 12:00:00 -0500");
    user_pref("mail.identity.id1.header.webtvstationery",
"X-WebTV-Stationery: Standard; BGColor=black; TextColor?=black")

Fun stuff. Useless, but fun.

On the server side, I use a bit of .procmailrc Tagging to color code
messages in Thunderbird:

    # Color tagging for Thunderbird:
    # 1-Important
    # 2-Work
    # 3-Personal
    # 4-ToDo
    # 5-Later

    :0 fhw
    * ^From:.*jholloway@nks.net
    | formail -I "X-Keywords: \$Label1"

    :0 fhw
    * ^From:.*@nks.net
    | formail -I "X-Keywords: \$Label2"

    :0 fhw
    * ^.*@blenke.com
    | formail -I "X-Keywords: \$Label3"

This actually ends up being quite useful.

Anyone else have some useful or otherwise interesting headers they use? 

-- 
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>
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