[H-GEN] Mailing List

Bradley Marshall brad at humbug.org.au
Thu May 27 23:27:53 EDT 2004


On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 12:47:27PM +1000, Paul Gearon wrote:
> Bradley Marshall wrote:
> >On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 12:13:58PM +1000, Paul Gearon wrote:
> >On the other hand, most of the lists I'm on, which are security / sysadmin
> >related, don't use Reply-To.
> OK, I'll confess surprise.

SAGE-AU lists, Debian lists, LinuxAus list, some Mac lists,
and some LDAP lists I'm on all don't have a reply-to header.

Mailman's configuration section strongly suggests not having
a reply-to, and in fact this is the default setting.

> That said, I did notice it the other way for 2 types of lists:
> 1. Announcement lists, where people don't normally respond
> 2. AUUG lists (ie. lots of sysadmins!).  The thing that struck me about 
> these lists is that there seemed to be a LOT of offline discussions!

It does take some getting used to if you're used to having reply-to.
Watching who you're sending email to is a good habit to be in, I scan the
headers before I hit the send button.

> Does your email client have IMAP support

Yes.

>  and a bayesian spam filter?

No, thats provided by an external program, in good Unix
tradition of a program doing one task only, and doing it well.

> If not, then would you consider it broken?

I'd suggest that IMAP is a good feature for a mailer to have,
but that the bayesian filter would be better provided by an
external program, such as SpamAssassin.

> It's great that you and others have mail clients that support this feature. 
> A lot of peoples' clients don't.  The number of people whose clients don't 
> would seem to imply that this is not a "common" feature to most mail 
> clients.  

Its unfortunate that more MUAs don't have this feature,
especially considering that more and more mailing lists will
be setup without a reply-to header, since its mailman's
default[0], and there aren't many other good mailing list
managers around[1].  

> So no, not having this feature might be annoying (for use with 
> these lists), 

And the many, many, many other lists out there without a
reply-to header.  Believe me, not having a reply-to header is
not rare at all.

> but hardly broken.

I don't see the abscene of a header broken either, especially
since there are other ways of dealing with it.  

Thanks,
Brad
-- 
Brad Marshall
brad at humbug.org.au
http://quark.humbug.org.au/

[0] : Path of least resistance, people are more likely to leave settings on
      the defaults.

[1] : Mailman has its failings too - especially for larger installations.
      My current workplace's mailman listinfo page takes around 15 
      seconds to load[2], with the approximate 800 mailing lists.

[2] : Before I got hacking and put in some caching, that is.




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