[BLU discuss] Re: Multiple clients over Linux PPTP --- Motion to Ban Use of Undisclosed Recipients on this List

[Derek Martin]

John Abreau did expound, once apon a Today:

> On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Michael O'Donnell wrote:
> > RFC822 and friends have layed out a wonderfully
> > flexible scheme for email headers - let's work within
> > those bounds.  I (so far) am not terribly concerned
> > .....
> 
> What would you suggest as an alternative?

Firstly, I'd suggest asking the user who did it to stop.  In the roughly
four years that I've been on usenet/mailing lists, this is the first time
(well, second -- I think this user or another posted a similar message
recently) that I've seen this.  I don't think it's a big deal.

However, in the unlikely event that this became a real problem, I
personally would like to see the list do some sort of filtering of
messages that do this.  I'm not that familiar with majordomo so I'd be
disinclined to make a specific suggestion, BUT I will comment that my own
preference would be to DELETE the message, over munging the headers.  

Better still, so as to promote discussion, rather than stifle it, if
majordomo provides a way to do this, would be to insert the list's posting
address in the To: header of the original message, so that it is included
as a "recipient" in a reply-to-all kind of deal.  That is, where in the
original message, there were "Undisclosed recipients", the list replaces
the "undisclosed recipients" with its own posting address.

I am NOT a fan of mucking with the headers, in general, especially of
inserting a `Reply-To:' header or mucking with the subject.

Considering how long the header munging debate has raged on across the
net, I'm really surprised that mailing list software and e-mail clients
don't have some sort of mechanism for dealing with this sort of thing...
Like a `X-from-maillist:' type of header.  I was discussing this just
yesterday with a dude from the GNHLUG list.

-- 
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
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Derek D. Martin      |  Unix/Linux geek
derekm at mediaone.net  |  derek at cerberus.ne.mediaone.net
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