At 11.01 -0800 04-12-09, Russ Allbery wrote:
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.
This is the way that I feel about it too, but as other people have
commented in this discussion, not everyone feels that way and some people
really want to get those personal copies.
It is certainly nice to be able to separate replies to what
you have written yourself from everything else in a mailing
list. This could be either only direct replies or also
recursively for replies to replies, etc.
However, achieving this by adding all authors in the chain
into the CC or To header is not the best idea:
(1) Because CC and To was not invented for this
(2) Because not all mailers sets the author in the To or CC
header when replying to a list message
(3) Or some senders might manually edit out those To or CC
headers
For this reason, relying on your own name in To and CC
messages to tell you that this message was a reply
tosomething you wrote yourself is very inreliable.
Another, better way of implementing this is to use the
"In-Reply-To" and "References" headers. They already
contain the information necessary to see if a message is a
reply to what you have written yourself, so why not use
them?
One things which surprises med is that so few MUAs give
the kind of support which can be done by cleverly using
information in the "Message-ID", "In-Reply-To" and
"References" headers. They also allow useful features
like "Show me the message, which this message is a
reply to" or "Show me all the messages in this reply
tree.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/