Re: Reply-To munging & member_aliases
Reality check: Most mailers today already theoretically give users some kind of option over where a reply goes. The problems arise because in the real world, users pay no attention to that stuff. They barely know how to hit Send.
So what in the world would delude us into thinking that if we introduced some kind of per-member Reply-To: option, these people would know or bother to use it? They'll never touch it! The only people who will change it are the people who are already savvy enough to direct their replies correctly without it.
Also, on lists of the COMET-ANNOUNCE-L variety, where the admin has specifically set a reply policy or reply address, it seems positively harmful to allow individual members to override it.
I do not see the usefulness of this per-member patch.
The per-member patch that I WOULD like to see added is member_aliases - a list of alternate addresses under which a given member posts. "Address creep" is a daily plague, and it's not adequately answered by creating nomail "ghost members" or stuffing the accept_these_nonmembers pool, because when people leave things get out of sync. If the per-user options screen allowed both user and admin to edit an alias list, and if we wrote a little add_member_alias script, things would go a lot easier.
Tom Neff <tneff@bigfoot.com> writes:
Reality check: Most mailers today already theoretically give users some kind of option over where a reply goes. The problems arise because in the real world, users pay no attention to that stuff. They barely know how to hit Send.
So what in the world would delude us into thinking that if we introduced some kind of per-member Reply-To: option, these people would know or bother to use it? They'll never touch it! The only people who will change it are the people who are already savvy enough to direct their replies correctly without it.
Also, on lists of the COMET-ANNOUNCE-L variety, where the admin has specifically set a reply policy or reply address, it seems positively harmful to allow individual members to override it.
I do not see the usefulness of this per-member patch.
The usefulness of a subscriber reply-to option is that it should reduce the bandwidth devoted to reply-to munging dramatically. Rather than each "let's change reply-to" post turing into a several-hundred-post thread, as they always seem to, those threads would be squashed by a single reply: "If you don't like it the way it is, go to this URL and change it."
Cheers,
-- Joe Knapka
--On Tuesday, April 22, 2003 8:04 AM -0600 Joseph Knapka <jknapka@earthlink.net> wrote:
The usefulness of a subscriber reply-to option is that it should reduce the bandwidth devoted to reply-to munging dramatically. Rather than each "let's change reply-to" post turing into a several-hundred-post thread, as they always seem to, those threads would be squashed by a single reply: "If you don't like it the way it is, go to this URL and change it."
Except that doesn't change it for the whole list, which is what the "let's change reply-to" complainers want - it only changes it for replies from that particular person. The bandwidth will still be consumed.
On Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 01:34:35PM -0400, Tom Neff wrote:
Except that doesn't change it for the whole list, which is what the "let's change reply-to" complainers want - it only changes it for replies from that particular person. The bandwidth will still be consumed.
reply-to whiners can have the option they want. Those who feel that they need to say how the list should be for others can have their posting priviledges removed.
It's simple, really :-)
Marc
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R. Microsoft is to operating systems & security .... .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/ | Finger marc_f@merlins.org for PGP key
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"jk" == Joseph Knapka "Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: Reply-To munging & member_aliases" 22 Apr 2003 08:04:31 -0600
jk> Tom Neff <tneff@bigfoot.com> writes:
>> I do not see the usefulness of this per-member patch.
jk> The usefulness of a subscriber reply-to option is that it...takes the management of the list out of the list owner's hands.
If there is to be such an option one would hope that the list owner would be able to determine whether or not it is available to the subscribers of his particular list.
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participants (4)
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jam＠jamux.com -
Joseph Knapka -
Marc MERLIN -
Tom Neff