Re: Gnome mailinglist / digest mode

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

Ted Lemon wrote:
> 
> > You know, it seems to me that this sort of thing could be set on a
> > per-subscriber basis. On pretty much every list I've been on there has
> > been a lengthy debate over whether there should or should not be a tag
> > in the subject line. The correct answer for anything religious like this
> > is to allow both.
> 
> This is _not_ religious.  If you have a mailer that can sort incoming
> messages, but only based on the subject line, it's _broken_.

Perhaps so, but people don't always have control over the mailer they
use. And it's not necessarily the mailer that's broken. Perhaps their
mail goes through a gateway to a proprietary mail system which doesn't
allow extra headers. Or perhaps they can't sort into multiple mailboxes
for some reason and still want to be able to pick out which messages are
from what lists.

> Sorting based on arbitrary headers is *trivial* to implement once you have
> sorting at all.

Perhaps so, but not everyone has the luxury of an open source mailer.

I use Netscape Communicator to read email, and I just noticed that I
can't show columns for arbitrary headers in the list of messages. Again,
it would be trivial since it already has columns at all, but it's not
there and I can't do anything about it except switch to a different
mailer (or to Mozilla 5.0) which I have other reasons for not wanting to
do.

> Demanding that the maintainer of the mailing list
> hack the mailing list software to the users' individual preferences,
> particularly in order to compensate for broken software, is
> ridiculous.

I'm not demanding anything. Just suggesting. I'm not even sure that you
have to hack the software, and if you do, it should be a simple hack
given that a) it obviously already has the capability of globally adding
a subject tag and b) it most likely already has the capability of
handling per-user preferences (like digest-mode etc) if they're using a
common list server.

Again, I'm not complaining or demanding. Just pointing out that a lot of
people want this feature and a lot of people don't, and that I think a
general compromise would be a good thing, so that this debate doesn't
appear periodically on every single list until the end of time.

> Remember that if everybody asks the list admin to do something, the
> list admin has to do the work N times, where N is the number of
> subscribers.   If the subscriber does the work, s/he only has to do it
> once.

Well, pardon my ignorance, but why would the list admin have to do this
N times? Given that I've never administered a list before, I intuitively
would think that only one person would have to do this one time for
every list, by including the capability in majordomo. I'm not trying to
come off as argumentative, just curious.

Tim Moore