Date: Sun, 24 Sep 1995 14:06:50 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Cc: nate@rocky.sri.MT.net, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: multiple mail messages Message-ID: <199509242106.OAA03837@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199509240747.IAA29850@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Sep 24, 95 08:47:56 am
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> > Actually, I *intentionally* leave people on the Cc lists if I think the > > material is going to be discussed some, since with the bulk_mailer stuff > > it is difficult to discuss topics with any sort of speed, since it may > > take a very long time for the person to get the reply via the mailing > > list. > > Do you remind that many people are not within a "can get'em within 10 > minutes" US Internet anyway? :-) > > For me with my polled UUCP link for example, i'm typically getting 50 > ... 100 messages in a single batch... No speedup by duplicates. :) I've sometimes wondered if it's worthwhile to hack the mail tools for a message id field to be respected by majorodomo when handling mail from someone on the basis of crossposts. I've also wondered about changing the header rewrite to be more elm friendly. The elm program has "r(eply)" and "g(roup reply", and the way the headers come in from the mailing lists means you can "r" to the original sender or "g" to the mailing lists. For questions, I pick "g" so the answers go into the archives and I don't have to answer the same thing over and over again (as much, anyway). If I don't take the time to edit the "To" line post-facto after this, then there's a duplicate message to the questioner. In the case of the questions list, this is generally not a problem, since the questioner may not be a member of the list, and this is the only way to guarantee that the answer both goes to the list archive (and any other people who had the same question and *are* on the list) and the original questioner. For discussion lists, like hackers and current, etc., this works to a disadvantage, since a thread will typically grow duplicates with each responder in the thread body. On the other hand, these lists *also* do not enforce list membership, and so there is no way to ensure the original sender gets the reply other than doing group replies. One soloution would be to have majordomo delete duplicate targets from the to line. That is, if it goes to multiple lists, then send it once to the recipients that are on multiple lists. This would require a n:m map of actual recipient lists and an i:j map to lists based on a message id field. It's questionable whether this is realistic, given the processing requirements. inbound: hackers hackers-list hackers+questions-list current+hackers-list current+hackers+questions-list current current-list current+questions-list current+hackers-list current+hackers+questions-list ... outbound: hackers+questions-list bob@foo.fee fred@xxx.yyy current+hackers-list tom@zzz.zzz barb@qqq.qqq current+hackers_questions-list mark@fff.org ... Finally, this would once again break elm, since duplicate message would be distributed to a single list by list order of the recipient, and the use of the elm "filter" program would not guarantee proper list ordering. For instance, a crosspost to current/questions/hackers that "belonged" on questions would go to hackers only for the hackers+questions-list members, current for the current+hackers+questions-list and the current+questions-list and the current-list members, etc. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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