[Zope] Zope Mailing List Software is hugely inconsistent!

[Ken Manheimer]

> -----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