At 12:57 PM 5/22/2001, Keith Moore wrote:
With respect to mailing lists, I'll partially disagree with Keith. For
most mailing lists, the list agent is best thought of as a user, in terms
of MTA behavior.
treating lists as either "users" or "MTA" inevitably leads to confusion.
it's more realistic to say that they are somewhere in between, acting
as users at some times and as MTAs in others.
Hmmm. Thought my statements were rather more clear than your response
indicates:
With respect to MTAs, a sender and the list represent source and
destination points. Both are user agents, representing the beginning and
ending of an MTA sequence. The same for List and recipients, with the list
this time acting as source and recipients acting as, well, recipients.
Hence, a mailing list distribution causes two, discrete MTA
post-transfer-deliver sequences.
However there is a higher-level process at work, between the original
sender and the final recipients. At this level there is a single
transaction, covering the two list-mechanism subordinate transactions.
no disagreement with any of the above. I was just saying that the
generalization "lists are users" has often led to incorrect conclusions,
even if a list is closer to an MUA than to an MTA.
The difficulty with creating proper Reply behavior is that our standards
mechanism were not designed for this higher-level construct. It's a bit
like trying to represent 3 dimensions in 2.
there are lots of ways to describe the difficulty with getting a reply
behavior that satisfies everybody. for one thing, I don't think we've
even come close to getting consensus on what is "proper", much less
getting agreement on a protocol that encourages such behavior.
there are better ways to do this, such as the List-* fields which are
unambiguously for use by lists.
Well, yes, it is always cleaner to invent tailored mechanisms, but they are
only practical if the community will use them. So far, they won't.
I see some adoption of the List-* headers, though not as much as I would like.
what can we do to encourage them?
Keith