Red Gnus: Posted & e-mailed detection

[Russ Allbery <eagle@cyclone.Stanford.EDU>]

(Forgive me if this has already been suggested; I haven't been paying
extremely close attention to the various proposed features.)

I highly dislike getting copies of posts via e-mail when they aren't
marked as such in any standard fashion, but an ever-growing number of
people seen determined to keep doing that.  As such, it would be nice if
Gnus could detect such messages and tell me about them.

It occurred to me today that one way to do that which would work for any
newsreader that generated its own message IDs (so that the ID for the
mailed and posted copies would be identical) would be to just send an
XPATH request to the news server for each mail message, or perhaps for
each mail message in certain mail groups (I wouldn't have to check all the
mailing list traffic that I get, but I'd like to check each personal
message).  If it returns something, then the message was also posted.

It could also just be a new function, so people would have to explicitly
check.  That would probably be the best way of doing it.

This assumes that the message has already shown up on your news server by
the time you read the mail message, so it's not quite ideal, but it's an
idea anyway, and for those of us with fast news feeds, it would be
reasonably effective.  If you already have a server connection open, it
should be fairly fast as well.

Anyway, I thought I'd throw out the idea and see what people have to say
about it.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@cs.stanford.edu)      <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>