[Mailman-Developers] SF bug report #223533

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 4/5/02 6:17 PM, "Barry A. Warsaw" <barry@zope.com> wrote:

> It's fairly old <blush> but it's complaining that there is no way to
> tell the difference between a list posting and an administrative
> message via the List-* headers.  I think it's actually recommending to
> add another header(!) only to list postings.

I've felt that including list-id on administrative messages is a bug.

If you read 2919, it says this:

   This header SHOULD be
   included on all messages distributed by the list (including command
   responses to individual users), and on other messages where the
   message clearly applies to this particular distinct list.

It clearly isn't being distributed by the list. Does an admin message apply
to a particular distinct list?

Yesbut. These messages aren't coming from the mailing list, but the list
server. 

I think it's appropriate that any message from list foobar@domain.org going
to an end user be flagged with a list-id of foobar.domain.org. But messages
sent to an admin aren't coming from foobar. They're coming from mailman. I
feel that flagging them with a list-id of foobar.domain.org is incorrect,
because the source is the server, not the list. It's about the list, but not
from the list. I think that's an important distinction.

I would argue that administrative messages be flagged with a list-id
identifying the server, not any specific list. In other words, I'm
suggesting:

    List-ID: mailman.domain.org

I think that's appropriate for the situation, and acceptable within the
rules. Whether you agree depends on how you interpret that clause in 2919,
which I argue is ambiguous, because I think the INTENT is to include
specific to the list, and it doesn't handle the situation we're talking
about. These are messages about a list, but not from the list, so I'm
arguing that you shouldn't flag them with the list's list-id.

I think you could also argue that since they aren't coming from the list,
there should be NO list-id. I could live with that, too, but I think it's
useful to flag these as messages from the daemon for filtering purposes, and
I think I'm extending the RFC a bit but in a reasonable way.

I just think flagging admin messages with the list's list-id is wrong. It
should either be a server-id, or not there.

Chuq

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/

The Cliff's Notes Cliff's Notes on Hamlet:
    And they all died happily ever after