[Mailman-Users] RFC for List Message Header Fields

[Tomas Fasth]

Darren Henderson wrote:
> Email is not the web the web is not email. I don't like bluring the
> distinction. It assumes a lot about about users and the state of the
> world. It may lead people to think that embeding html in email is a good
> thing.

I concur, sort of.
E-mail services should have e-mail methods to operate. In the same
time, those having reliable access to the web would benefit from
list software supporting web-based administration.
What I think they tried to achieve by using URLs in the headers
was to allow a richer description of what's required to do to
stuff, like what address, what to write as subject, what to write
in the body, and such. Of course, URL is not useful for WWW only.
It's a pretty generic format for all kinds of network services.
E-mail is a sort of a network as well, no? The big win using a
standard format like URL is that it can be interpreted by a
machine, and used to automate services like subscription and
unsubscription. Today, as a user, you mostly have to guess the
behavior of each type of list software.
I missed one optional header though: List-URL for the list
homepage.

Tomas