On Sep 10, 2004, at 1:08 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
well, I'm not sure if I found the message that explains _why_ you
don't
want to see them, but I did find a message that explains that you want
replies to list mail to end up in a list folder and not in your inbox.
I can expand a little bit; I'm not sure how much I said before.
I think of mail folders a little bit like newsgroups, in the sense
that my
mail folders are not only a convenient way of sorting topics together,
but
also acquire different priorities, invoke different quantities of
guilt if
messages sit unresponded-to, and are read at different times and to
different degrees.
[...]
Okay, that makes sense. I actually do much the same thing; it just
happens that I want replies to mail I send (whether from a list or not)
to be looked at at "inbox" priority. All of the list traffic that
isn't addressed to me is handled at a lower priority.
And that explains why having messages move from your inbox to the list
doesn't help much if you happen to have read your mail in the meantime
- since you're trying to avoid having replies to list traffic trigger
interrupts at a higher priority than you intend.
I can think of other ways to handle this at the MUA than trusting
to/cc/bcc fields - for instance: when you send a message to an address
your MUA knows is a list, have your MUA associate a priority with the
outgoing message-id. Then when a message comes back that is a reply to
that message id, file it with the list mail. Though this wouldn't
treat private replies differently from "wide" replies.
None of this is perfect at suppressing duplicates, of course. For that
matter, neither is mail-followup-to.
I do think we're going to see a lot more sophistication in future MUAs.
It's fairly clear that we haven't scratched the surface yet.
Keith