[Mailman-Developers] Idea of subscription options (beside Digest)

[Garreau, Alexandre]

In case you were lacking useful high-level features idea, while arguing
recently about good netiquette of citing, not citing, puting or not
puting original sender in this or that header, and also less recently
about who to exclude/censor/ban or not from a mailing list, I found some
that might be useful so to standardize mailing lists working per user
instead of per mailing-list, so at subscription propose potential
following options, beside “Digest mode”:

“Don’t send me mail with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ CW” (CW = content-warning): X being
either specified in subject line (more accessible) such as “[CW X, Y]”,
or in a specific header (more discrete) such as “X-Content-Warning: X,
Y”, where X and Y are tags/abbreviations such as “sex” (for
sexually-explicit)/“nsfw”, “politics” / “sexism” / etc. (more shocking
or offending stuff), etc. or even maybe generalizing the concept to more
common stuff such as “ot” for “off-topic”, “flamewar”, “rp” for
“roleplaying” so that to make the concept more widely known and
tested. May be really useful to continue threads that might really
interest people and strive for democratic debate, without risking to
repulse some people from the mailing-list, and without having to ban
some people or discussions, and without continuing the discussions in
private (that might exclude silent and not-enough-participating people).
    
“Mail me too, altogether as other mailing-list members”: this has become
a widely inconsistant behavior for me between mailing lists and
mailing-lists softwares, I can never recall it, nor can I recall to
configure my user-agent to store a copy of what I sent or not.  A such
option, instead of making this consistent over a single mailing list or
software, would make it consistent per user, and might be more
convenient for them.  Also could help expliciting the configured default
for each mailing-list

“Mail me regularely a reminder” (about that I’m subscribed and how to
unsubscribe, may be really useful for low-trafic mailing lists) or even
“unsubscribe be after X delay of inactivity”.

“Don’t mail me again mails that are already also addressed to me” (when
the member is already cited in To, Cc, or Bcc for instance) since some
people do complain about receiving some mails several times, and it
might relieve mailing lists of sending more mails.

“Don’t mail me mails from threads I’ve not participated in, except first
message”, the most complicated, and would require to keep a list of
participant to a mailing-list, or a local mapping of message-id to
source mail addresses (so you can check References header instead of
recursively Reply-To).  But this might encourage a lot of people to join
a lot of mailing lists, and some mailing lists to touch a lot more
people, as the traffic would be lower, and they might still react to
announces and important stuff discussed there.

“Don’t mail me mails from threads I didn’t started”: actually a
misunderstandement of the previous one that I did explain, also a lot
more easy to implement I guess, and that may be useful for mailing lists
which don’t allow to send mail through them if you’re not subscribed.
May be a disablable option in case you wan’t your subscribers list to
stay a list of people who follow your list, and not just a list of
people who may want to post, otherwise you might prefer allow everybody
to post to your mailing list.

Hope I’m encouraging and giving more ideas than I’m disturbing or
seeming expectative.  I find these would be really lovely features, but
not being a lot used to python, nor to going into large unknown code
base, I don’t think that would easy for me to improve mailman for those…
but I’d like, if you have time and that doesn’t disturb you, to have
your opinion on these.

Thank you anyway!