[MlMt] Perverted Smart Mailbox idea

[Bill Cole]

On 23 Jul 2014, at 10:32, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> On 22 Jul 2014, at 15:46, Bram Heerink wrote:
>
>> I use plus forwarding to be able to see which websites are sending me 
>> e-mail. For example personal+amazoncom at bramheerink.nl. Then I was 
>> thinking about the Example Mailing List Smart Mailbox which has a sub 
>> folder for each list-id. I was wondering if this could be done with 
>> the + forwarding label. But then you need regexp's in the MailMate 
>> query system or something implemented for the plus part. Some 
>> thoughts about this here?
>
> As Torsten already replied then this is possible. It would also be a 
> nice addition to the default set of specifiers and I'll probably add 
> that when I've returned from vacation. It shouldn't take long to add. 
> The hard part is probably to choose good names for these specifiers 
> :-)

The moniker "tagged addresses" has become common in referring to the 
ability to augment addresses with delimited tokens that have special 
meaning to receiving MX servers and/or their local delivery agents, so 
"tag" might be a recognizable specifier name.

Also worth noting: different mail systems support different tag 
delimiters. The '+' is an ancient Sendmail tradition (originally swiped 
from PMDF, iirc) but other MTAs support other characters, most commonly 
'-' which originated with qmail. Recently Postfix added the ability to 
define an arbitrary set of characters as delimiters. Increasing the 
hilarity, CGP supports path/to/imap/folder#baseaddress local-parts *AND* 
is often configured to support tags suffixed with '+' or '-' or both. 
Then there's GMail, supporting both '+' tags and arbitrary insertion of 
'.' into the base address. It would be useful for MM to allow 
specification of tag delimiter(s) but it would be extremely cool if 
there was a way to add address parsing rules to identify arbitrary 
specifiers. (A global solution for hunger, disease, and violent 
tribalism might be a less challenging feature...)