[Mailman-Users] B4 changed the To: line?

[Christopher Allen [BigFatPipe.Net]]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Don Cooley wrote:
> We have had a nice long debate about changing the To: line.  What sees
> to be forgotten is that our lists serve PEOPLE and people who, by and
> large, have little experience with lists.  What seems to be clear to the
> experts here can be absolutely confusing to the members of our lists.
> (I have 3800 members on various prostate cancer lists so it tends to be
> old men.)

Thank you!  This is exactly the case.  While there are lots of theoretical
and philosophical reasons to put the actual recipient into the To: field,
end-users have a hard enough time understanding the difference between
"reply" and "reply to all," let alone "something that was sent to them,"
vs. "something that was sent to a list, but marked as though it was sent
to them."

> When I send an email I assume it goes out the way I sent it.

... without alteration of existing header data.  Quoting RFC 821:

     | Notice that the forward-path and reverse-path appear in   |
     | the SMTP commands and replies, but not necessarily in the |
     | message. That is, there is no need for these paths and    |
     | especially this syntax to appear in the "To:" , "From:",  |
     | "CC:", etc. fields of the message header.                 |

> Why can't the List ID contain only the name of the list and not the
> other material.  Easy sort.

We advise our users to sort on the X-BeenThere: or List-Id: headers.  As
of yet I haven't had a user complain that this wasn't possible, but I'm
not up to date with the GUI mail clients so I don't know what limitations
they may have.

Here's my suggestion, valued at what y'all paid to receive it:  Since the
role of the list package is to redirect the mail to subscribers, wouldn't
addition of a "Resent-To:" header be more appropriate than munging of an
otherwise accurate To: header?

-CA