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Re: [ProgSoc] uts.edu (Now with 10% more rant)



On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 08:20:34AM +1000, marauder wrote:
> * Christian Kent <whophd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-10-21 01:28]:
> > PPS, on second thoughts, why not just get majordomo to behave differently 
> > on 'cc'?  If the list is on 'cc', and it contains a subscriber who is on 
> > the 'to' list, then majordomo forgets to send that person a copy, on 
> > purpose.
> 
> This breaks all the extra functionality a decent email client provides
> when it receives mail from a mailing list, because none of the list
> headers will be present.
> 
> The real solution is for people who are bothered by multiple replies
> to get *their own mail clients* to set Reply-to to the list address,
> for mailing lists they subscribe to, and list+self, for lists they
> don't subscribe to.  This seems to be winning behaviour as far as
> RFC822 is concerned.  It's pretty much what the Mail-followup-to:
> header was supposed to achieve, but without adding an extra,
> non-standard, poorly-supported header. 

It's interesting to point out, the phrase "mailing list" doesn't appear
anywhere in RFC822. We should not be surprised if many of the defined
meanings of the various headers simply do not make sense in the context
of a mailing list.

For instance, I did not send this email to you, progsoc-owner did. If
there is a Reply-To header on this email, then what does it mean? RFC822
says this header belongs to the "originator" of the email. Who is that?
Well, RFC822 doesn't say, but if you don't consider mailing lists and
just consider normal mail transport, then the meaning is quite obvious
which is perhaps why they didn't bother to define it precisely. There is
a subtle difference between how usual mail transport works, and what a
mailing list does, and the meaning of the headers is not as clear in the
latter case.

Now let's go back to first principles and understand the logic behind
mailing lists. We subscribers all made an agreement with the progsoc
mailing list that it will mediate all communications made through it.
So once again, I did not send this email to you, progsoc did. Logically,
in the normal case you should reply back to progsoc, and that is the
idea behind the operation of a mailing list. Where progsoc is failing in
its responsibility to mediate communications is when it comes
distinguishing between subscribers and non-subscribers. The progsoc list
certainly has the list, and would be able to distinguish between the two
kinds of poster, but it doesn't. The problem with all of the workarounds
is that they push this responsibility on to all of the users so that the
problem needs to be dealt with in many places instead of one place.
Certainly the list itself is capable of handling this for everyone, so
why not?

The answer may simply be that nobody has proposed a good solution to the
problem yet. I'd like to hear if anyone has any solutions.

To me, a reasonable solution seems to be as follows. Since the mailing
list is responsible for sending out all of the emails, and receiving
replies, it should set its own Reply-To header. If a non-subscriber
wants to be CC'd on any reply, then the non-subscriber should CC
him/herself.

Ryan

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