Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:
You have completely missed the point; a list owner doesn't know what the
author desires -- merely having a list of potential authors doesn't
help.
The list owner often does, actually. Mailman has an explicit setting
saying "please try to suppress duplicates in mail sent to me and to the
list." The way that Mailman implements that feature currently (by
suppressing the list copy since it can't stop the personal copy) does the
wrong thing for me, and therefore I can't currently use it, but nothing
requires that the feature be implemented in that fashion if some better
approach presents itself.
List management software is trending towards having a full-featured
options interface where subscribers can manage preferences like this.
Now, I don't know if the average user will be able to handle using one of
those interfaces, but that's more of a UI design question.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>