Re: Handling mailing lists

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Jérôme Marant <jerome.marant@fr.thalesgroup.com> wrote:
>   Currently, if you want to handle mailing lists as speficic recipients,
>   i.e. make as if a reply-to contained the mailing list address in mails
>   you receive from that list, you have to edit to-address and to-list
>   variables in group parameters.

to-address is sufficient.

>   However I've seen in other MUA more practical ways of implementing
>   this: a list contains all mailing list addresses you subscribed to
>   and whenever you reply to a mail, the MUA try to find one of
>   these addresses within To: or Cc: and if so, it fills the To: field
>   of your reply with the mailing list address.

I think the way to do this would be:
if Mail-Followup-T is set in the original message
  use it
else
  build a list of recipient addresses from the original message that
  match message-subscribed-*;
  if the list is not empty
    use it as the recipient list for the response
  else
    use the current behavior

I guess this could be wedged into message-get-reply-headers.  I'm not
sure it would be a good idea, though: a thread crossposted to multiple
lists will get silently limited to just whichever list(s) you happen
to be subscribed to.  (to-address is just as bad (or worse) in this
way.)  But you'd still have to edit group parameters to set to-list
for new messages, so I don't see how this saves you any work.

The Right Way is for all MUAs to support MFT.  Effort spent on kluges
to work around the lack of MFT could instead be spent working toward
the real solution, by promoting MFT to MUA maintainers and the other
posters on lists you're subscribed to.


paul