OFFTOPIC Re: [Mailman-Users] Archive URL in postings (2.1b3)

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 08:55  AM, Nigel Metheringham wrote:

> However I find the addition of my delivery address into the To line
> highly irritating

Why? I'm curious.

What you're seeing is the move of mailman away from a bulk delivery 
model.

Why? Because, among other things, it's the first step towards a 
fully-customized setup. 2.1 allows you to customize various aspects of 
your subscription in ways that couldn't be done before. Also, more and 
more mail systems throw a tainted eye at all bulk mail (and for that 
matter, anything that is sent using BCC), and I think it's important 
that we understand that and differentiate mailing lists from those bulk 
deliveries.

> Seeing my
> own address in a message header raises a mental flag that this message
> was sent to me personally,

Well, it was. Mailman carefully packaged up the message I posted, and 
then customized it to the preferences of each subscriber of the list. 
yours was set up JUST for you, in fact. As the personallization aspects 
are added to the message templates, you'll see that more obviously. And 
if you choose to customize your subscription, you'll start taking more 
advantage of it...


>  and sincere as you are no doubt being Chuq, I
> don't think you would consider the last batch of messages from you all
> personally addressed to me :-)

actually, we could argue the philosophy of that at some point...

> If you want to put the real delivery address in the message put it in
> the footer - some mail systems (hello sendmail) happily bugger around
> with the header lines anyway so its not even a (completely) safe marker
> of which account is subscribed to the list.
>

Actually, sendmail does a good job of this. The only mail server I'm 
really pissed at these days is First Class (hint: I just wrote a new 
bounce processing system for a project. I fed it 70,000 bounces, and it 
managed to handle all of them except about 800. Of those 800, half were 
from first class servers. In fact, NO first class server bounce was 
able to be automatically processed. Exchange and Notes were very 
distant second and 3rd for messing up stuff such that I couldn't 
process things....)

Sendmail gets a bad rap for things that people writing stupid 
interfaces to it make it do.

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

Very funny, Scotty. Now beam my clothes down here, will you?