Never-ending arguments about mailing lists considered harmful (was: Re:

Keith and others,

While...

        (1) I agree that this (and any SpamAssassin or other
        header-insertion or filtering) would, ideally, better be
        done as a per-subscriber optional feature, and
        
        (2) I recognize that, if for some reason (unfathomable
        to me, but there is no accounting for taste), people
        encapsulate messages in message/rfc822 body parts and
        then sign them (or archive hashes of messages including
        the headers), any modification of the encapsulated
        message would wreak havoc, and
        
        (3) I've got an MUA (and an MTA) that are capable of
        filtering on Return-path and/or List-* and/or receipient
        (including subaddress)fields,

there are three things about this discussion that bother me...

(i) A number of efforts within the community have pointed to the 
advantages of having more routine work done in a routine and 
automated way by the secretariat.   Since the secretariat is 
operating with very tight resources (something else that has 
been in enough documents and presentations that I assume/hope 
everyone knows), it is in _our_ advantage to let them automate 
anything they can sensibly automate without causing _severe_ 
problems.  Conversely, asking for things that might take large 
amounts of time and energy (such as per-user setting of tag 
fields or application of spam filtering), is, IMO, pretty lousy 
prioritization.
(ii) Even with powerful filtering and organizing tools, some of 
us prefer (as a matter of taste) to not have, e.g., one folder 
or color per mailing list or other correspondent.  For us, a 
subject line indicator of source makes it easier to organize 
things cognitively.  Is it a big deal one way or the other?  Not 
for me at least; I can't speak for others.  But it is helpful to 
some of us, regardless of what the MTA or MUA may or be able to 
do.  And that makes me (at least) a little intolerant of people 
starting religious wars that, themselves, consume large amounts 
of (human as well as network) bandwidth, if only because...
(iii) I am, personally, getting concerned that the IETF is 
approaching the point where we are more concerned about process 
and administration than we are about doing high-quality design 
and engineering and getting high-quality results out.  I don't 
think we are there yet, and I think the trends in that direction 
are still reversible, but I take
        * the relative amount of energy the community seems
        willing to spend discussing two, essentially trivial,
        changes to mailing list management, or
        
        * the fine details (rather than broad issues) of a
        process WG charter, or
        
        * heated arguments about proposals for which most of the
        people actively participating in the discussions have
        clearly not read the relevant documents, or

        * IESG being willing to tie up Proposed Standards (or
        even lower-maturity documents) in order to make sure
        that all of the grammatical and procedural niceties are
        adhered to, or

        probably several other things that belong on that list...

as symptoms of serious and deep problems with our priorities and 
how we do business.
For the record, before I'm quoted out of context (as I probably 
will be anyway), our copying procedures from SDOs that have 
become much more procedure-bound, so much so that they often 
appear to no longer care about quality or adoption or 
interoperability of standards as long as the many procedural 
rules are followed to the letter and they can report getting 
more standards out one year than in the previous one would not, 
IMO, be a good idea ... indeed, it would be closer to the height 
of stupidity.
To make a distinction that may be useful before you (or someone 
else) replies, if you (or someone else) wants to get on a tear 
about NATs, I may or may not agree with you, and I may or may 
not believe that the flaming the topic tends to generate will 
result in any real progress or changes in behavior, but at least 
I'm sure the issue is important to the future of the Internet. 
Can you say the same for whether the Secretariat and its mailing 
list machinery adds (or does not add) a few headers to a message 
or a few characters to a subject line ... assuming they don't 
_break_ conforming software used in a rational way (e.g., with 
the robustness principle in mind)?   And, if the answer is "no", 
is there any hope of increasing the ratio of meaningful 
technical standards work to this sort of debate around here?
regards,
   john


--On Thursday, 18 December, 2003 09:58 -0500 Keith Moore 
<moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> wrote:
> <sarchasm>
> Maybe we should also rewrite the From header field so that
> people with dysfunctional MUAs won't have trouble replying to
> the list?
>
> Maybe we should also rewrite the Reply-to field so that it
> doesn't matter when people get confused about the difference
> between reply to author and reply all?
>
> And let's be sure to rewrite the To field so that everyone who
> uses that field to collate list traffic will get the messages
> put in the right bin.
> </sarchasm>
>
> It's taken us ~15 years to get rid of "features" like those
> mentioned above that well-meaning authors of list software put
> in to work around lack of user agent functionality.  We're
> still not rid of all of it.
>
> I used to call it "header munging disease" - the idea that if
> a message passes through an intermediary, there's a strong
> temptation for the author of that intermediary to consider
> munging every header field (as well as the message itself)
> just in case it could somehow be useful to somebody -- never
> mind that this removes valuable information from the message,
> and reduces  everyone's ability to use the messages to that of
> the least capable MUA.
>
> Putting [foo] in the subject header is just another example of
> this trend.  Sure, it might be useful to people with
> dysfunctional MUAs, and there are a lot of those people out
> there. There were once a lot of people whose MUAs couldn't do
> "reply all", too.
>
> The short-term solution is to make [foo] an optional feature
> specified on a per-recipient basis.
> The long-term solution is to fix the MUAs to recognize and do
> appropriate things with List-* fields.