[Mailman-Developers] Author_is_list option in upcoming mailman 2.1.16

[Murray S. Kucherawy]

I really wish I could keep up with all the lists where interesting stuff is
going on.

We produced an RFC a few years ago that tries to tackle the names and
definitions of all the various roles (RFC 5598).  That document
deliberately avoided defining what a Sender is because that word has become
so overloaded as to be hyper-ambiguous.  Thus:

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>wrote:

> Franck Martin writes:
>
>  > In the upcoming mailman 2.1.16 there has been the introduction of
>  > the optional feature author_is_list
>  >
>  > "Replace the sender
>
> Before you release, s/sender/author/, please.  When discussing
> Internet email, sender != author.  The name of the feature, "author is
> list", is an obvious falsehood: lists don't write posts, they relay
> them.  These policies do not conform to the email RFCs.  (Given the
> semantics of "From" set out in RFC 5322, they may even constitute
> copyright infringement in the absence of a license from posters
> permitting From-munging.  But that's not the topic here.)
>

I disagree.  Formally, Mailman is creating a new message using (likely) a
large portion of the original message.  Unless the output is completely
identical, Mailman is an Author.  So I think the name is right, unless you
want to tie the name of the feature to the list's configuration, and I'm
sure you don't want to do that.

This isn't absolute of course.  There are mushy topics like "Did the
Message-Id change?"  (One could argue that if the Author changes, a new
Message-Id should be generated.)  "Should a new Message-Id have been
generated?"  (Yes, if there was any meaningful content change whatsoever.)

Either way, I think the name is right as-is.

-MSK