suggestion for Full Customization [Mailman-Developers]

[Brad Knowles]

At 2:54 AM -0400 2004/05/10, James Ralston wrote:

>  ...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 of the fundamental concepts of a mailing list is that people 
know that the content is being shared with multiple recipients, and 
anything they receive via the list is public knowledge (at least, to 
the other list recipients), and anything they post will likewise be 
public knowledge.  By breaking this concept and making everything 
appear to be private e-mail sent directly from the moderator to the 
individual recipients, you are completely changing the apparent 
nature of the communication.

	In a sense, you are lying to the recipients, giving them the 
illusion that each and every one of them is privately receiving this 
content.  Moreover, any response that they may have has a much higher 
likelihood of being something that they'd share privately but would 
not state publicly, or at least wouldn't say the same thing in the 
same way.  There would then be a serious risk that this response 
would then be shared with all the other recipients, perhaps to the 
very serious detriment of the responder.


	Fundamentally, mailing lists should not try to hide the fact that 
they exist, and that the content being sent and received is being 
shared amongst other people.

	It's fine for mailing lists to try to hide the details of their 
inner workings, perhaps to make it more difficult for people to abuse 
them inappropriately.  But they should not try to hide their very 
existence.

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

	Nope.  It still sounds to me like you're trying to abuse the 
software for spamming.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.