-----Original Message----- From: Jon S. Jaques [mailto:lists@almus.com] Sent: Thursday, September 09, 1999 1:27 PM

[...] I guess this is what I see as the stickler: To my way of thinking, when I get messages from a list, they are "From: THE LIST". Not from users and developers that I've never met. Doesn't that make sense? That also encourages interaction with the list members, because a "normal" reply, from ANY mail client, will send to ONLY the list; You must do a "reply to all" in order to also send to the private addresses on the email. This is a Good Thing.

Well, it's funny - we've had *vigorous* argument from people on both sides on this. In fact, mailman sets the message envelope "sender" to the mailing list, which is what it's supposed to do - it is acting as a proxy for the person. However, it does *not* muck with the "from", and should never do so. In general, we feel, it's better to err on the side of caution. The way it is, when someone isn't thinking and sends a reply by reflex, it only goes to the original author. The potential loss is that something they meant to send to the list didn't go there - easy to fix. Resend including the list. The way you're suggesting, when someone makes the mistake and accidentally sends to the list when they just meant to send to the original's author, well, it's real hard to convince everyone to forget they saw what you didn't mean to send to them.-) Whoops. Often a particularly nasty whoops, since a common reason for limiting the response audience is sensitive info they don't want the wider community to see. In any case, as i indicated above, there are people who argue strongly in both directions. We can't make everyone happy. I believe what mailman does is conventionally considered the proper behavior for mailling list systems, and i don't think it's going to change. I'm not sure what's at the bottom of the header variations you're seeing - i'm not even clear anymore to which header you're referring. However, i don't think anyone often, if ever, posts directly from the mailman host system, and i do think you need to key on some different header(s) for your filtering, if that one is a problem. (As i mentioned before, i use a server-side rule which keys on the mailing list address being in the to or cc headers, and that works 99.9% of the time - the .1% it doesn't trigger is on purpose, for messages that have my address among the to or cc headers.) All that said, i wish you luck getting the filtering to work - i think the outlook/exchange filtering mechanism is a shitload harder to use effectively than it ought to be... ken klm@digicool.com