Re: Gnome mailinglist / digest mode

[Ted Lemon <mellon hoffman vix com>]

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

If it sounds like I feel strongly about this, it's because I do.   I
maintain several mailing lists, and I'm constantly getting requests
from users for me to customize the mailing list in ways that they
could perfectly well do for themselves if they only took the trouble.
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.

			       _MelloN_