[Mailman-Developers] Author_is_list option in upcoming mailman 2.1.16

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sep 18, 2013, at 05:04 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>I don't read German, but I don't see anything that looks like data,
>nor is there room for "analysis."  Nor does the blog by Patrick
>Koettner referenced therein.  (The Google translations confirm that.)
>Please show us something that looks like data and analysis.
>Specifically of interest:
>
>    Number of lists, number of users on each list (min, mean, max
>    would do), duration of operation in this mode, type of users (mail
>    admins vs. general technical vs non-technical), the MUAs in use,
>    any discussion from the users themselves.

Indeed.  I'm skeptical about how well encapsulation will go over with
end-users who have no understanding about these issues (nor should they).

End users just care about how the email looks in their mail readers.  I'm
concerned that this will be a nice, RFC-compliant feature that makes things
easy and workable for all the automated systems involved, but will look
horrible to end-users and just make them upset.  If that's the case then IMHO,
it a failure.

OTOH, maybe we won't know for sure until it gets *a lot* more testing.  But I
think it's a mistake to say "well, we just have to force MUA developers to
catch up".  As we've seen with something presumably as simple as
reply-to-list, it (almost) never happens.

-Barry