[LMB] AKICOT:L - eBay Bidding

[Mark Mandel]

And, alas, having moved my subscription to Gmail (which actually filters
spam), I now find the the filters seem to ignore colons.

Mark Mandel

On Feb 16, 2008 12:20 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:

> Ed Burkhead wrote:
> > I don't know why some people are now inserting the colon - I never
> > saw that explained.
>
> One of the other conventions of the list is that off-topic messages
> should be flagged, in the subject line, with the marker "OT:". This
> makes it possible, in most e-mail programs, to filter such messages -
> block them completely, or shunt them to another folder. The colon is
> present so that an innocuous word like "Bothari" won't trigger the
> filtering.
>
> Since AKICOTL messages are almost inevitably off-topic, and since the
> acronym already contains the "OT", it occurred to someone to insert the
> colon to enable the filtering (as opposed to requiring "OT: AKICOTL").
>
> Jim Parish
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