[Mailman-Developers] The bulk issue

[Ken Manheimer]

On Sat, 19 Dec 1998, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

> >>>>> "JV" == John Viega <John@list.org> writes:
> 
>     JV> I think you're *supposed* to use "Precedence: list" for a
>     JV> mailing list.  Might want to check the RFC.
> 
> I'm not finding this in the docs I've consulted, RFC 2076 and its
> Jan-1998 update:
> 
>     http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/ietf-mail-attributes.html
> 
> Looks like Precedence: bulk is as close as it gets.  Interesting
> enough, we don't add this to posted messages, but we *do* add this to
> emailed passwords.  I'll try to add this, and (maybe) other list
> related headers referred to in the document.

I actually did look it over a bit, and from RFC 822 (or somesuch)  it
sounds like precedence: bulk has a dubious pedegree.  More importantly,
after reviewing the vacation man page, i realized that the precedence:
bulk header would be redundant for mailing list traffic, since most of
the kinds of things that respect it also refrain from responding to
messages that do not have the recipient's address explicitly mentioned
among the destination addresses, which is inherently the case for
maillist traffic - so the precedence: bulk is unnecessary.  (I should
have mentioned this when i originally realized this.)  So i'm not sure
adding precedence bulk is a good idea.

The password reminders (and other administrative messages) are another
matter, because they are directed to specific individuals.  I actually
added the precedence: bulk to the password reminders in a mad scramble
just before the end of last month - the scramble was because i *dreaded*
the deluge of vacation-message responses i was getting, as
mailman-owner, from the python.org mailing list mass reminders
delivery...

Ken