At 16.39 -0700 04-09-17, Russ Allbery wrote:
"please try to suppress duplicates in mail sent to me and to the
list."
Suppose a person subscribes to two mailing lists A and B,
and has his/her MUA sort their messages to two folders A
and B. And suppose there is a message sent via both lists.
What is then the best behaviour?
(a) Show each list-message as a separate message in the
folder for that list, and mark each of them as unread, so
that reading one copy will not set the other copy marked as
read.
(b) As (a) but some kind of link between the two messages.
(c) As (a), but reading the message in one folder marks it
as read also in the other folder.
I think most users would prefer (c), some might prefer (b).
===
A related issue is if a message arrives in two copies, one
with the recipient as personal recipient, the other via a
mailing list. When this happens, the cause is almost always
faulty handling by the sender's MUA, and the intention is
that the message should only be sent to/via the list. So in
this case, the best receiving MUA behaviour is probably to
completely suppress the personal copy of the message.
===
All described above is easy to implement if the mailer
keeps a data base of message-ids and which messages they
refer to. A problem is that a few messages do not have
message-id, and a worse problem is that some very
unfriendly mailing list software will change the message-id
when expanding a message to a list.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/