suggestion for Full Customization [Mailman-Developers]

[James Ralston]

Brad,

On 2004-05-06 at 10:26:05+02 Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> wrote:

> At 7:03 PM -0400 2004/05/05, James Ralston wrote:
> 
> > If I have set the "personalize" option to "Full Personalization",
> > a very likely reason why I have done so is because I don't *WANT*
> > the recipient to reply back to the list--or, for that matter, even
> > realize that the message was sent through a mailing list at all.
> > I want the recipient to see an individual message that looked like
> > it was sent *from* an individual person *to* an individual person.
> > 
> > Adding the list address to the CC header perfectly defeats this.
> 
> This is a mailing list.  Mailman is a mailing list manager.  It is
> not a "hidden address so you can spam" manager.  We're not trying to
> hide anything here, and I doubt that anyone is going to be
> interested to see code in the mainstream package that would try to
> address this "problem".

I've been lurking on these lists for a few months now.  In that time,
I've seen you generally act friendly and helpful towards others.  So,
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your
rude and unprofessional reply was a result of a really bad mood, a
complete misinterpretation of what I was suggesting, or both.

Given these two points:

1.  Mailman already allows list owners to configure their lists so
    that only a few select people are permitted to post.  The typical
    case in which a list owner would want to do this is the situation
    where a single person wants to send "announcement" -type messages
    to a non-trivial number of recipients.

2.  Mailman already has personalization features, so that messages can
    be customized on a per-user basis.  One of the personalization
    features is the ability to customize the "To:" header for each
    recipient, and move the list address to the "CC:" header.

...why would you even *want* to have the listname for an announcement
list exposed in the To and/or CC header of messages sent through the
list?  If a recipient replies to the list, it's just going to go to
the moderators, right?  In most cases, the person who is sending the
messages will *be* the moderator.  Why not just bypass this
indirection and have the replies go directly to the sender (i.e., the
moderator)?

One counter-argument would be that if a list had multiple moderators,
you would probably want people to reply to the list (instead of one of
the moderators individually), so that all of the moderators could
possibly act upon the reply.  But that's actually an argument for
permitting the list owners to decide where they want the list address
to appear (if at all).

Which is what I not only suggested, but *volunteered to contribute*.

Are the specifics of what I'm suggesting clearer now?