On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 10:35:01 -0600 John Buttery john@io.com wrote:

• J C Lawrence claw@kanga.nu [2002-10-29 19:51:03 -0800]:

...

John Buttery john@io.com wrote:

Thinking that the address in the To: field is an address that the sender originally targeted directly may not be universal, but I think it's pretty close. *shrug*

I find that most people (unofficial survey, extensive conversations, total population probably >30, <100) pay that much attention to the headers on list-related posts, and when they do, more or less consider all the addresses in the headers to be the "intended destination" without distinguishing which header is which. Private email is a

little< different in that people do seem to start to distinguish among

the headers, but not a whole lot.

...

One has a List-ID header, one doesn't.

One has an In-Reply-To that references my prior post, one doesn't.

You're right about this, I hadn't fully thought things out before I said that. However, it doesn't solve the problem of not knowing whether one of these list postings is the first of two duplicates, or just a normal posting.

Err, the one without the List-ID is the direct mail and the one with is the one via the list.

Someone just posted something about the In-Reply-To: header that may or may not refute that part, but it's moot because your point stands on the List-ID: header alone.

<nods>

True, and I take that statement back for the same reasons as above. :p And, of course, I was not encouraging people to post private emails on-list, which is a MASSIVE etiquette breach...I was just trying to point out a situation in which "information loss" would happen.

No worries.

Part of the background logic on all this is that the To: and Cc: headers are actually meaningless. Sure, most people don't know that, but I would expect that the members of this list are very comfortable with the fact that the To: and Cc: headers need have absolutely no relation to the original or current message envelope. As such they start out being weak suggestions, not statements. If you really want to know, and you trust the Received: headers (which are themselves not totally trustworthy, but that's another matter) look for destination envelope comments in the Received: headers.

Received: from mail.python.org ([12.155.117.29]) by kanga.nu with esmtp (Exim 3.36 #1 (Debian)) id 187IQu-0005ed-00 for claw@kanga.nu; Thu, 31 Oct 2002 08:44:36 -0800