[H-GEN] A request to the list maintainers

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Fri Feb 14 18:52:27 EST 2003


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Bruce Campbell wrote:

| On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Greg Black wrote:
| 
| > 1. Drop the "Reply-To" header munging that is currently carried
| 
| Ah, its that time of year again.  You have of course considered both sides
| of the argument, such as the one below, yes?:
| 
| 	http://www.metasystema.org/essays/reply-to-useful.mhtml

Yes, I have indeed.  I had intended to include a reference to
this URL in my original post, but got distracted by something
else and forgot it.  Thanks for correcting my oversight.

Obviously, from the request I made, I am personally a believer
in Chip Rosenthal's "harmful" tag.  Other people will, of
course, find the "helpful" view to be appealing.  I've just
submitted this for consideration with the hope that enough
people will agree with me for a change to happen.

If the decision goes against me, I have no problem with that.
If the list rules are changed to prohibit this kind of
discussion, I will abide by that.  For now, it seemed like a
legitimate topic.  I know some people see it the way I do; I
know others don't.  Somebody in the Humbug hierarchy will make a
decision one way or the other.  I hope that person (or persons)
will take account of the case I've made.

| > 2. Drop the deferred sending of messages.  I have often found
| >    myself replying to a message that has already received a
| >    perfectly good reply -- if the original reply had been sent
| >    out when it was received, I'd have seen it and known that
| 
| If you are referring to messages that were initially bounced due to
| non-member posting and are later approved, then that particular situation
| is not changing.

Of course I'm not suggesting that should change.

| If you are referring to something else, such as the batching behaviour
| that is present in most reasonable MTAs, then please clarify the behaviour
| that you are seeing, in words other than 'stuff is slow'.

In the case of the last dozen or so messages that I have sent to
this list (of those I still have on file here), the average time
that elapses between my MTA delivering the message to caliburn
and caliburn delivering the message back to me is in the range
from 18 to 22 minutes (with a couple of outliers -- 7m and
38m).  A couple of minutes seems to be normal for other lists
and it's what I'd like to see here.

Again, this is just a request, based on what I think are
reasonable expectations from observing common practice on other
public lists (including lists that I administer).

None of my arguments is meant to be critical of anybody in
Humbug or of the lists -- I'm just articulating a couple of
issues that, in my opinion, would improve the list operations.

Greg

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