Thread: Adding Reply-To: to Lists configuration ...
What is the general opinion of this? I'd like to implement it, but not so much so that I'm going to beat my head against a brick wall on it ... ---- Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> writes:
> What is the general opinion of this? I'd like to implement it, but not so
> much so that I'm going to beat my head against a brick wall on it ...
I think we've discussed this in the past, and the consensus has always
been that more people like it as-is than want to change it. I'm
certainly in the leave-it-as-is camp.
regards, tom lane
Re: [HACKERS] Adding Reply-To: to Lists configuration ...
From
jseymour@linxnet.com (Jim Seymour)
Date:
"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> wrote: > > > What is the general opinion of this? I'd like to implement it, but not so > much so that I'm going to beat my head against a brick wall on it ... The procmail rules I set up for each mailing list to which I subscribe sets Reply-To to the mailing list *unless* there's already a Reply-To set. If you're going to do it, that's what I'd recommend doing. Jim
Are you saying this is going to make it impossible for me to reply just to the poster, or is this an option that is set by the user via majordomo? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim Seymour wrote: > "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> wrote: > > > > > > What is the general opinion of this? I'd like to implement it, but not so > > much so that I'm going to beat my head against a brick wall on it ... > > The procmail rules I set up for each mailing list to which I subscribe > sets Reply-To to the mailing list *unless* there's already a Reply-To > set. If you're going to do it, that's what I'd recommend doing. > > Jim > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate > subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your > message can get through to the mailing list cleanly > -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > Are you saying this is going to make it impossible for me to reply just > to the poster, or is this an option that is set by the user via majordomo? No, the poster will still be included as part of the headers ... what happens, at least under Pine, is that I am prompted whther I want to honor the reply-to, if I hit 'y', then the other headers *are* strip'd and the mail is set right back to the list ... ---- Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
Marc G. Fournier wrote: > On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > > > > Are you saying this is going to make it impossible for me to reply just > > to the poster, or is this an option that is set by the user via majordomo? > > No, the poster will still be included as part of the headers ... what > happens, at least under Pine, is that I am prompted whther I want to honor > the reply-to, if I hit 'y', then the other headers *are* strip'd and the > mail is set right back to the list ... I think my mail reader, 'elm', will always honor the reply-to, which is bad I think. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> writes: > No, the poster will still be included as part of the headers ... what > happens, at least under Pine, is that I am prompted whther I want to > honor the reply-to, if I hit 'y', then the other headers *are* strip'd > and the mail is set right back to the list ... I'm in the "Reply-To considered harmful" camp. I also don't see any real evidence that the current setup is causing problems. -Doug
Doug McNaught said: > "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> writes: > >> No, the poster will still be included as part of the headers ... what >> happens, at least under Pine, is that I am prompted whther I want to >> honor the reply-to, if I hit 'y', then the other headers *are* strip'd >> and the mail is set right back to the list ... > > I'm in the "Reply-To considered harmful" camp. I also don't see any > real evidence that the current setup is causing problems. > And the historical document referred to can be found here: http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html and an opposing view here: http://www.metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.mhtml cheers andrew
Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> We've done quite well with the current setup, so I don't see a need to
> tinker with it. I've always found the Reply-to-enabled lists I'm on to
> be a more lossy medium.
The basic issue is that the current setup encourages
reply-to-author-and-list, while adding Reply-To encourages
reply-to-list-only (at least when the replier is using one of the mail
clients I'm used to). Peter correctly notes that reply-to-list-only
creates problems for authors who aren't subscribed. The other point
that looms large for me is that reply-to-list-only forces every
conversation to occur just at the speed and reliability of the list
'bot. Without wishing to tread on anyone's toes, it's undeniable that
we have a long history of slow and unreliable forwarding through the PG
list server. I'd rather have contributors to a thread converse among
themselves, and let the list server catch up when it can.
Personally: if Reply-To is added to the list headers, I can and will
reprogram my mail software to ignore it. But I doubt that most
contributors to the lists have that option.
regards, tom lane
On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 07:34:28PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
> What is the general opinion of this? I'd like to implement it, but not so
> much so that I'm going to beat my head against a brick wall on it ...
>
Personally I'm against it because it means that I'll often get two
replies when people reply to my postings. However it's not a big
issue for me.
--
Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
Chris Green <chris@areti.co.uk> wrote: > > On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 07:34:28PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote: > > > > What is the general opinion of this? I'd like to implement it, but not so > > much so that I'm going to beat my head against a brick wall on it ... > > > Personally I'm against it because it means that I'll often get two > replies when people reply to my postings. However it's not a big > issue for me. Actually, it would result in just the opposite. Jim
On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 07:35:41AM -0500, Jim Seymour wrote:
>
> Chris Green <chris@areti.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 07:34:28PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > >
> > > What is the general opinion of this? I'd like to implement it, but not so
> > > much so that I'm going to beat my head against a brick wall on it ...
> > >
> > Personally I'm against it because it means that I'll often get two
> > replies when people reply to my postings. However it's not a big
> > issue for me.
>
> Actually, it would result in just the opposite.
>
It depends on the mailing list software, you could be right. However
on another mailing list where I'm a member I get two copies of
messages when people do 'Reply to all' simply because I have a
Reply-To: of my own set. (I have Reply-To: set so that if people want
to send me a personal reply it gets to a mailbox I will read. If you
reply to my From: address the message will end up in a catch-all,
low-priority, probably junk mailbox).
This is a perpetual problem, if people all used the same MUA and
(assuming it has the capability) all used the 'reply to list' command
to reply to the list everything would be wonderful! :-)
--
Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 02:36:10 -0500 Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> The basic issue is that the current setup encourages
> reply-to-author-and-list, while adding Reply-To encourages
> reply-to-list-only (at least when the replier is using one of the mail
> clients I'm used to).
[narrowed to psql-general as i'm not subscribed to hackers...]
there is also a technical list administration consideration. i generally
set up lists [1] to encourage replies to the original author and leave
the rest to the reply author for the simple reason that there used to
be a lot of broken MTAs out there that would spam error bounces
everywhere except to the correct address (anyone remember
MSMail? Lotus CC:Mail was pretty awful too.)
this is not so much a problem now, as most MTAs have at least a
semblance of RFC 821/2821 conformance on error processing, but
i still see the odd busted MTA sending error messages to email addresses
dredged out of wildly inappropriate spots in the message headers.
it's up the list admin, ultimately. if reply-to does get set to the list,
hopefully we'll be lucky and nothing really really bad will happen.
richard
[1] running internet mailing lists since 1985
--
Richard Welty rwelty@averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592
Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes: > The basic issue is that the current setup encourages > reply-to-author-and-list, while adding Reply-To encourages > reply-to-list-only It also makes it impossible to reply to the author personally. Normally there are two actions possible on a message, "followup/wide-reply" and "reply" and MUAs provide separate buttons. Setting reply-to inappropriately essentially forces both buttons to be "wide-reply". The suggested behaviour is actually the worst of both worlds since it would mean "reply" would sometimes send a personal reply to the poster and sometimes send a wide-reply to the list, depending on whether the poster had already set reply-to. Required reading on the subject: http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html There are proper ways to encourage reply-to-list-only. Set the header: Mail-Followup-To: <listname> > Personally: if Reply-To is added to the list headers, I can and will > reprogram my mail software to ignore it. But I doubt that most > contributors to the lists have that option. In fact what they do is ask for MUA features to ignore reply-to headers. Leading to an escalating weapons race of lists more and more forcefully breaking MUAs so that MUAs can more and more forcefully break standards in order to work correctly in the face of broken lists. Compatibility and standards are collateral damage. -- greg
On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 12:49:46 +0000, Chris Green <chris@areti.co.uk> wrote: > > This is a perpetual problem, if people all used the same MUA and > (assuming it has the capability) all used the 'reply to list' command > to reply to the list everything would be wonderful! :-) I think using mail-followup-to is better than having people do reply to list. I think the main benefit to having reply-to point to the list is for supporting clueless users on lists (who don't seem to understand the difference between reply to sender and reply to all) and I don't think we have too many of those here. When I am subscribed to lists that force reply-to to point to the list, I have my mail filter remove those headers so that things will work normally (other than not allowing a sender to use reply-to of their own). Reply-to would be especially bad for the postgres lists as nonsubscribers can post and that the list servers are often slow. People who don't want separate copies of messages should set the mail-followup-to header to indicate that preference. This isn't perfect since not all mail clients support this and some set up is required to make your client aware of the list. It is also possible for mailing list software to handle this preference for you (by not sending copies to addresses on the list that appear in the recipient headers), but I don't know if the software in use has that capability.
On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 02:02:41AM -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 12:49:46 +0000,
> Chris Green <chris@areti.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > This is a perpetual problem, if people all used the same MUA and
> > (assuming it has the capability) all used the 'reply to list' command
> > to reply to the list everything would be wonderful! :-)
>
> I think using mail-followup-to is better than having people do reply to list.
>
It depends on how the 'reply to list' is implemented surely. With
mutt (the MUA I use) you specify the addresses of known mailing lists
and the 'reply to List' command uses this to detect from the headers
whether the mail is from a list or not and acts accordingly.
> I think the main benefit to having reply-to point to the list is for supporting
> clueless users on lists (who don't seem to understand the difference between
> reply to sender and reply to all) and I don't think we have too many of those
> here.
>
The disadvantage of setting Reply-To: to point to the list for me is
that it would override my specific Reply-To: and thus prevent people
sending replies direct to me if they happened to want to do that. A
message sent to my From: address gets sorted by procmail to a very low
priority mailbox which I may well overlook. (I use a different
address for list subscriptions from the one I use for personal mail)
> People who don't want separate copies of messages should set the
> mail-followup-to header to indicate that preference. This isn't perfect
> since not all mail clients support this and some set up is required to
> make your client aware of the list. It is also possible for mailing list
As I said my MUA does this.
> software to handle this preference for you (by not sending copies to addresses
> on the list that appear in the recipient headers), but I don't know if the
> software in use has that capability.
>
--
Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 09:33:18 +0000, Chris Green <chris@areti.co.uk> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 02:02:41AM -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote: > > On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 12:49:46 +0000, > > Chris Green <chris@areti.co.uk> wrote: > > > > > > This is a perpetual problem, if people all used the same MUA and > > > (assuming it has the capability) all used the 'reply to list' command > > > to reply to the list everything would be wonderful! :-) > > > > I think using mail-followup-to is better than having people do reply to list. > > > It depends on how the 'reply to list' is implemented surely. With > mutt (the MUA I use) you specify the addresses of known mailing lists > and the 'reply to List' command uses this to detect from the headers > whether the mail is from a list or not and acts accordingly. That doesn't work in general since the client can't know which recipients are actually on the list. However mutt does utilize mail-followup-to headers when doing group replies and that works well for replying to lists.
Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> writes:
> It is also possible for mailing list software to handle this
> preference for you (by not sending copies to addresses on the list
> that appear in the recipient headers), but I don't know if the
> software in use has that capability.
That's a good point. It looks like our list software *can* do that
(send majordomo a "help set" command and read about "eliminatecc" setting)
so rather than try to force the same behavior on everyone, I think
it's sufficient to tell those who prefer only one copy to enable that
preference.
regards, tom lane
Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> writes: > It is also possible for mailing list software to handle this preference for > you (by not sending copies to addresses on the list that appear in the > recipient headers), but I don't know if the software in use has that > capability. I've noticed some lists starting to do this. The only reason I notice is because they appear totally broken for me and anyone else sorting the messages into folders depending on whether they arrive via a mailing list. When I read the list I read it in a separate group from my personal mail. When someone Cc's me I get two copies, one in my personal mail and one in the list folder. That's fine with me, it integrates well with the order in which I read my mail and with my settings to purge list mail but archive personal mail. But For lists where the list software has started implementing this broken behaviour the behaviour I see is that the list folder is just incomplete. It randomly misses some messages and not others depending on whether the sender Cc'd me in the headers. A lot of work seems to be going into making list manager software work around limitations of broken mail readers. In the process they're making it really hard to make mail readers that aren't broken work properly. (On that note I would dearly love to get rid of the stupid "[GENERAL]" "[HACKERS]" etc tags? Filtering on subject is a dumb way to filter your mail, there are perfectly good headers inserted by the list manager that don't get confused by cross-posts and personal followups and so on. I have procmail rules that remove the tags when they match the list name but postgres's lists' tags don't so they slip past.) -- greg
On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 01:59:07AM -0500, Greg Stark wrote: > (On that note I would dearly love to get rid of the stupid "[GENERAL]" > "[HACKERS]" etc tags? Filtering on subject is a dumb way to filter your mail, I am with you on this. I find the tag useless and annoying. -- Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[@]dcc.uchile.cl>) "Some men are heterosexual, and some are bisexual, and some men don't think about sex at all... they become lawyers" (Woody Allen)
On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Greg Stark wrote: > (On that note I would dearly love to get rid of the stupid "[GENERAL]" > "[HACKERS]" etc tags? Filtering on subject is a dumb way to filter your > mail, there are perfectly good headers inserted by the list manager that > don't get confused by cross-posts and personal followups and so on. I > have procmail rules that remove the tags when they match the list name > but postgres's lists' tags don't so they slip past.) you can issue a 'set noprefix' for your subscription for this ... see 'help set' for all available "per user" settings that are available ... ---- Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 01:59:07AM -0500, Greg Stark wrote:
>
>
> (On that note I would dearly love to get rid of the stupid "[GENERAL]"
> "[HACKERS]" etc tags? Filtering on subject is a dumb way to filter your mail,
> there are perfectly good headers inserted by the list manager that don't get
> confused by cross-posts and personal followups and so on. I have procmail
> rules that remove the tags when they match the list name but postgres's lists'
> tags don't so they slip past.)
>
I absolutely agree and I've implemented a quick fix using my procmail
recipes:-
:0 fh
* ^TOpostgres
| sed 's/\[GENERAL\]//'
:0 A:
postgres
I now get to see more of the subject without the distraction of
[GENERAL] stuck in the middle of it! :-)
--
Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
Chris Green <chris@areti.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 01:59:07AM -0500, Greg Stark wrote:
> >
> >
> > (On that note I would dearly love to get rid of the stupid "[GENERAL]"
> > "[HACKERS]" etc tags? ...
[snip]
> >
> I absolutely agree
I hate the damn things with a passion.
> and I've implemented a quick fix using my procmail
> recipes:-
>
> :0 fh
> * ^TOpostgres
> | sed 's/\[GENERAL\]//'
> :0 A:
> postgres
I like this better (for if you're on more than one pgsql list):
:0 fh
* ^TO.*pgsql-.*@postgresql\.org
|perl -p -e 's/\[(ADMIN|GENERAL|HACKERS)\] //og'
Plus it has the added advantage of dealing with things like, oh,
say "Subject: Re: [GENERAL] [HACKERS] ..." ;)
>
> I now get to see more of the subject without the distraction of
> [GENERAL] stuck in the middle of it! :-)
Yup :)
Jim