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!