Re: Gnome mailinglist / digest mode

[Ted Lemon <mellon hoffman vix com>]

> 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.

Stuff and nonsense!  The To: header is required - it can't be
eliminated by a gateway.  And if they don't have a choice of what
mailer to use, then the time they waste filtering through their email
is a result of a choice they or their employer have made.  Why should
the mailing list administrator reward them for making a bad choice by
providing a workaround on the supply side, particularly when that
workaround inconveniences other users?

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

I would claim that everybody who is involved in the GNOME project
does.   Furthermore, the most popular proprietary mailers _also_
support the ability to sort based on headers - Eudora, NetScape
Communicator and Microsoft Explorer, for example.

> 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.

Communicator specifically should be able to sort messages with
different To: addresses into different mailboxes, so you should be
able to get the functionality you need without the mailing list
administrator's intervention.

> 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.

You have to add a new tuple to the user database, and code to support
that.   So yes, you have to do some significant hacking.

And you are asking for a new feature.   Perhaps not demanding, but
what I am trying to tell you is that instead of asking for it, you
should figure out how to help yourself.   Why should the burden for
making mail reading convenient for you rest on the mailing list
administrator?   Don't you understand the multiplicative nature of
placing this burden on the administrator, rather than taking
responsibility for it yourself?

			       _MelloN_