[Tutor] Please send messages only to the list.

[Lance E Sloan]

"Jesse W" wrote:
> Wow.  I have started a monster.  I am amazed and aghast.  The 
> doubled messages did not bother me that much, I just thought it 
> might be a misunderstanding or an easily fixable issue.  I see it is 
> _definitely_ not.  Thank you all for your patience. ;-)
> Oh, and viva Pegasus! (at least for those on Windows or Mac)

I didn't see this mentioned already, so please forgive me if I do
repeat something that's been written before.

I'm subscribed to the tutor digest.  The digest itself has a
"Reply-to:  tutor@python.org" header, but the messages within the
digest do not.  My mail client is a recent version of MH.  When I use
MH's "burst" command to break the digest into individual messages for
easier reading and replying, those individual messages don't have
"Reply-to" headers unless the sender set one.  For example, Michael set
one on the message with subject "Re: [Tutor] Curses programming".

I don't know whether burst behaves properly or if it should be using
the "Reply-to" from the digest headers.  Anyway, I just mean to point
out that it doesn't require somebody to reply to all to get the sender
of a tutor message.  I just used the vanilla reply command, and it
inserted your name, Jesse, into the "To" header.

Well, to make sure my message has some Python content in it (and not so
much rat), here's an idea for a Python Challenge (TM).  A program that
will eliminate duplicate email messages from the user's inbox.

Speaking from a UNIX point-of-view, it would accept an email message
from stdin and parse the headers for its "Message-ID" header.  Once
found, the ID is looked up in a list of recently received IDs.  If it's
found, the message is either discarded or stored in a file of dupes.
If it's not found, store the message in the user's inbox
(/var/spool/mail/[username]) or place it somewhere else (like use some
MH command to store it in a folder).  Such a program could be written
to work like the UCB vacation program, so it can be used in the
system-wide /etc/mail/aliases file or in a user's ~/.forward file.

Of course, this could be done in conjunction with procmail to make
the storing of the message easier.  In fact, procmail could probably
handle all of this without any Python involved, but that wouldn't
be fun, would it?

--
Lance E Sloan
Web Services, Univ. of Michigan: Full-service Web and database design,
development, and hosting.  Specializing in Perl & Python CGIs.
http://websvcs.itd.umich.edu/ - "Putting U on the Web"