(Up to: Ideas )

A suggestion for e-mail subject indicators within a small organization. :

> _

Graham and I thought it
would be a very good idea to
put USMC at the top
of mails from us lot so
people know what it's about.
_

Perhaps they don't remember it because they haven't read it - just what
sticking USMC in the subject circumvents... ;)

Now that I think about it too, however, this is a solution that only
partially solves the problem - that of separating club e-mails from all
others. There are various other factors that I feel should be considered
in parallel, and I believe that it would be a simple step from the
current situation to integrate such factors into mail headers, by
placing extraneous information inside parentheses after "USMC". These
factors are:

1. Importance of e-mail. This can be subdivided into temporal and
administrative importance. The former is assigned an integral priority
number between 0 and 9, where 9 is the highest priority and which is
used when the message regards activities in the immediate future, e.g.
Drivers for a trip leaving in less than an hour. Furthermore, an expiry
time and/or date can be assigned for increased visual filtering aid when
sorting through large amounts of mail. This time, to save space in the
Subject line, should, if used, be formatted as hh:mm:ss|dd:mm:yy using
24-hour clock notation, and abbreviating the year to the final two
digits.
If the time does not need a strict definition, then hh:mm:ss may be
replaced with a single hyphen character "-".
The second priority, administrative, should refer to the importance of
the message with regards to the fundamental operation of the club. This
is ranked on a discrete scale of 1-5, with 5 denoting the highest
administrative priority. For example, a message informing the entire
club of a sign-up at the next meeting should have an administrative
priority value of at least 4, depending upon trip location and status.
It would also be handy to suggest the appropriate committee member(s)
for that message, i.e. Those that we feel are responsible for the
matters within the message. This is appended to the administrative
priority value in the form of either a number or a letter as defined
below:

1 - C - Communications
2 - E - Equipment
3 - M - Meeting
4 - P - President
5 - S - Social Secretary
6 - T - Treasurer

For ease of recall, these are listed in alphabetical order. If a letter
is used, it is considered to be case insensitive. More than one letter
or number may be appended should the mail content cover areas for which
more than one person is responsible, however either a letter or a number
should be used for each committee member - not both.

Priority values should take the following format within the enclosing
parentheses:
   Ttimestamp.AC
Noting:
- T, temporal priority, is a number between 0 and 9 inclusive.
- timestamp may be omitted if unrequired. See notes above.
- A, administrative priority, is a number between 1 and 5 inclusive.
- C is a list of numbers and/or letters denoting suggested Committee
member attention.

2. Lengths of the message. Before starting to write the message, the
sender should estimate:
a). the length, in lines, of the entire message (disregarding any
signature but including quoted text being replied to - quoted signatures
should be included in this figure) that they intend to write.
b). the length, in lines, of the relevant/important content - this aids
the reader in the event of a hurried mailcheck, as once they have read
the specified number of lines, they are able to save the rest of the
message for reading later, assured that they have not missed any
important details. Should relevant content be intermingled with
irrelevant/unnecessary "padding" such as comments-on-the-side, a small
letter "i" should be appended to the second value.
These lengths should be formatted thus:
   R/Ti
where "R" is the estimated number of relevant lines, "T" is the
estimated total number of lines, and "i" is an optional marker
indicating that the relevant content is interspersed  througout the
e-mail body.

This is to be placed after the priority markers, separated by a single
backslash ("\") character.

For example:

Subject: USMC (714:30:00|28:02:00.3C\22/40i): New event for webpage

I hope that through the introduction of these protocols, the
Mountaineering Club shall become a cleaner, safer, more reliable and,
above all, more fun club to be in.