Subject: Re: mail headers for announce

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 19:15:07 -0500

> > The recipient list is a pretty poor way to deal with things when you
> > get mail sent to multiple lists you're on, and often the To: line ends
> > up with nothing at all. The Return-Path: is generally the surest way
> > to know which of the lists each of the messages was sent to. I've
> > tried lots of things over the years, and Return-Path: is what works
> > the best. I'm on a few hundred mailing lists so the matter is somewhat
> > important to me.
>
> On the other hand, when someone replies to you on most mailing-lists (To:
> you, Cc: m-l), at least _I_ don't want those hundreds of messages in my
> inbox, rather in the respective folders (both direct mail and the
> mailing-list version with Return-Path:).

some people want the personal copies, some don't.

I like to maintain reliable archives of the lists to which I subscribe,
and having a separate address for each list works well for that.
but it does mean that if a message is cross-posted to multiple lists
to which I subscribe, I get a separate copy of the message from each
list, in addition to any personal copies I might have received.

duplicate suppression is best done on the recipient end.  unfortunately
for the cause of duplicate suppression there is a trend toward lists
munging messages more and more (adding trailers or frobs to subject
lines).  I have a fair number of filters to remove those frobs from
subject lines - not only do they alter the messages, they make
one-line-per-message summaries (e.g. from/date/subject) harder to read.

Keith