On my way to work this morning I was wondering whether any email clients supported the RFC 2369 specification for sending mailing list command information in email headers. (Although on my way to work I didn’t realize that the practice of adding headers like “List-Help” and “List-Unsubscribe” to email messages had been codified into an official RFC.)

What I was really wondering was why my email program couldn’t simply recognize email from mailing lists and automatically filter it for me. (It turns out that RFC 2369 doesn’t really offer a header that identifies which list a message is from, although you could kind of infer it from the other headers. It wasn’t until RFC 2919 (March 2001) that the “List-ID” header was standardized, and a brief survey of mail in my inboxes shows that it’s less widely supported. (RFC 2369 was official in 1998, and had built up a lot of popular buy-in before then.) My email program, Eudora, is made by QUALCOMM, but even though RFC 2919 was drafted by QUALCOMM employees, there are no signs that it does anything with those headers. (Of course, just yesterday I had to go digging into some serious obscurities to find another Eudora setting, so I suppose it could just turn up if I look hard enough.)

I’m finding conflicting information with Google searches; one fellow says Eudora Pro handles RFC 2369 headers but the FAQ for Mailman (a popular mailing list management application) says that Eudora doesn’t handle them. The Mailman FAQ does point to exmh as a mail client which provides special services for the list command headers. So, in a round-about-fashion, I have an answer to my original question. (Of course, that would probably be an even harder switch to make than going to Apple Mail, especially since XDarwin seems to have taken a dive since I played with it last…)