In <41521A99(_dot_)3020607(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> Bruce Lilly
<blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:
You want to take a close look at the References field in your message. It
was 989 characters long, and ended with
"<I4C4wF(_dot_)AnI(_at_)clerew(_dot_)ma!" followed
by a folded " n.ac.uk>" on the next line. Also, it was full of TABs where
it had evidently been folded before during its travels, but the folding
had been systematically undone by some system somewhere. So there are two
buggy MUAs somewhere on this list. I have pruned a load of References out
of the header for this reply (but leaving the initial one, of course).
Charles Lindsey wrote:
If the author has some special
requirements of his own, he will include his own MFT (whatever) header,
and the list owner will do nothing further. We were discussing the case
where the author (through ignorance or laziness) did nothing and left it
to the list owner to supply a sensible default, consistent with the
culture of the list.
Others have addressed some of your assumptions. In addition, you
seem to be assuming that either
a) a human list manager will manually deal with every such message,
which is impractical
Certainly not that.
or
b) that some software will insert some canned field; given the wide
variation in possible author intent, that is likely to be wrong
much of the time.
No. The canned field, reflecting the culture of the list, will be
determined by the list manager, but only used in the event that the author
had indicated no intent (so what else could the list-manager do?). The
list manager's software may have attempted to check whether the author was
subscribed or not when constructing his MFT.
Moreover, you seem to be assuming that the only case of interest is
formally managed lists. That ignores cases where correspondence
takes place among a group of people with no list expansion at all.
I would not expect such an informal list to be using MFT at all. But if
some individual author had inserted an MFT anyway, then that might of
might not affect where replies from some list member went (depending on
which of his various "reply" buttons he pressed). If that did cause the
reply to be sent to the MFT set, then that is what the author intended and
so presuambly was Good Thing. Otherwise we would be back to the situation
which prevails today, and there is nothing that can be done about it. But
that is not the case we are currently discussing.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl(_at_)clerew(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave,
CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5