[Mailman-Users] Gmail "features"

[Lucio Crusca]

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
> Lucio Crusca writes:
>  > Feel free to try subscribing to the above list and try posting from
>  > gmail.
> 
> OK, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.  I need to sleep after
> that last goal by Mexico. :-(

Probably you don't need to try anymore (see Brad Rogers' post).

> That's definitely wrong.  I've been a gmail user for at least 5 years

You're right, Brad gave a clue about what's going on and his reply fits 
perfectly my observation.

>  > What's more against standards than throwing messages away like
>  > gmail does?  I wouldn't care too much if the patch concerned only
>  > gmail subscribers.
> 
> Sorry, but you're wrong.  Gmail is an MUA, 

Actually I already suspected that no RFC said what a MUA should do with 
messages. However Gmail is accessible via POP/IMAP also. AFAICT the same 
messages are lost also when accessing gmail via POP/IMAP, and in that case 
GMail is not only a MUA and it does break standards.

However that's not the real point. My sentence meant that if the patch were to 
violate standards only for gmail users that want it (e.g. users that activate 
an option in their mailman preferences panel), then that violation is less of 
a problem, at least from those users point of view, when compared to messages 
automatically being thrown away by gmail.

About the fact that you can always use a different MUA, unfortunately in many 
cases that's only theory. In practice changing your email address translates 
in a loss of time and often money. Either way, Gmail is not only a MUA.

>  > Please elaborate. That would be the solution. I imagine something fairly
>  > simple and not very intrusive, like adding something like this somewhere
> 
>  > in the mailman code:
> If you're willing to do it for all recipients but only for posts from
> Gmail users, 

No, I'm willing to do it only for gmail users that activate the relevant 
option in their mailman preferences. I think that doing it for anyone outside 
the users that explicitly ask for it is invasive and dangerous.

> you can do it in a Handler, pretty much anywhere in the
> pipeline.  I consider that non-intrusive and relatively benign because
> everybody's copy will have the same Message-ID for threading, Gmane
> searching, and the like.

I agree that could work well, but I don't understand email standards enough to 
feel comfortable in modifying message headers of outgoing mail for all 
subscribers.

> If you do it only for the Gmail-using subscriber, you'll probably
> screw up his threading because his copy of the message will have a
> different Message-ID from what everybody else refers to.  I find that
> to be pretty intrusive.

You are absolutely right. Probably changing Message-Id is not the best way to 
workaround that "feature" when applied only to the copy for the original 
poster. I wonder if there are any other headers that can be changed, only in 
the message copy for the original poster, that do the job.

> Also, as far as I know, doing that would require doing surgery on the
> personalization code, after the handoff to the outgoing queue runner.
> I'm not willing to advise you on that, I don't know that part of the
> code at all.

Ok, before that I need to identify correct headers to change anyway, assuming 
they exist...