[Mailman-Users] Gmail "features"

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lucio Crusca writes:

 > 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.

I don't think so.  Perhaps "MUA" is the wrong term for a message store
"in the cloud", but the fact is that Gmail is the final recipient as
far as the RFCs are concerned.  Eg, IMAP servers often implement SIEVE
recipes and spam filtering, so some messages will be lost.

In any case, no messages are lost; only copies with different
meta-data.

I don't really disagree with you that Gmail's behavior is horrible.
My point is that if you think its behavior is non-conforming, you may
be in for other, even less pleasant surprises in the future.

 > About the fact that you can always use a different MUA,
 > unfortunately in many cases that's only theory.

I can't say I have a lot of sympathy.  You get Gmail for free, you
shouldn't think it comes with no strings attached.

 > No, I'm willing to do it only for gmail users that activate the
 > relevant option in their mailman preferences.

I think that's best, but I can't help you with implementing that kind
of thing (in principle I know what to do, but I don't have time to
nail down the details for a while).  For Mark or Barry it's probably
quite straightforward, but of course their time is very valuable.

 > > 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.

Well, unfortunately Gmail is closed-source and I don't know what the
full algorithm is.  Surely Message-Id is part of it, but evidently
there are other aspects to it, or the behavior you and Brad
R. describe wouldn't happen.

 > 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.

I presume that there are.  Probably Brad's discussion gives a hint.

Steve