[Mailman-Developers] Re: confirmations

[John Viega]

On Tue, May 12, 1998 at 05:13:53PM -0400, Scott wrote:
> hmm, this might make my life with confirmations more difficult...
> (without addressing this, a patch for confirmations is on the way
> shortly...) 

> I've seen subject lines of bounced messages maintain the subject
> line, prepending it with some tag or other.  Is there any guarantee
> that scanning the subject will adequately determine what is and isn't
> a bounce?

Well, let's say your subject is:
List-name confirm (XYZZY-867-5309)

If you say, "reply to this message, or send a message with subject
XYZZY-867-5309", then You should be able to just see if the subject
line is the same, the ID exactly, or if it has an Re: or RE:
prepended.

> | 2) You could always have confirmations require an "extra web step"
> | instead of responding to an email.
> 
> email confirmations are easier (since the user will not have to change
> from a MUA to a webrowser to do anything) and therefore more
> desirable. 

Sure, but if there is no better solution that will always work...

> Any more ideas?  I'm prone to follow Barry's suggestion of the current
> practice, but that may be biased by the fact that my work with adding
> email confirmation of subscriptions and subscriptions to alternate
> addresses works in the current framework...

Well, if Berkley mail doesn't respect Reply-To:, that's quite a
problem.  I know a lot of people who use it because it is quick and
dirty (e.g., they don't want to wait for pine to load).

I don't mind ignoring it, but it's going to be a problem anyway :)