[Mailman-Developers] Author_is_list option in upcoming mailman 2.1.16

[Murray S. Kucherawy]

On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:

> End users just care about how the email looks in their mail readers.  I'm
> concerned that this will be a nice, RFC-compliant feature that makes things
> easy and workable for all the automated systems involved, but will look
> horrible to end-users and just make them upset.  If that's the case then
> IMHO,
> it a failure.
>
> OTOH, maybe we won't know for sure until it gets *a lot* more testing.
>  But I
> think it's a mistake to say "well, we just have to force MUA developers to
> catch up".  As we've seen with something presumably as simple as
> reply-to-list, it (almost) never happens.
>
>
We as developers and standards people often avoid engaging UI people (MUAs,
in our case) and issues specifically because it's a space that doesn't
follow rules, which is what we're used to.  That partition allows us to be
able to declare victory on our side of the line most of the time, but it
leaves us with the frustrations you've described here.

I wonder how long we can hold out before we start trying to drag them into
our conversations, which might be the only way to solve these pain points
long term.  It seems to me that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Thunderbird, etc., must
have either a team or an individual that spends time thinking about and
testing user-visible solutions to these problems, so perhaps it's time to
start asking them for help.

-MSK