On Mon, Jun 19, 2000 at 07:46:42PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 18, 2000 at 05:49:47PM -0700, Brian D. Winters wrote:
> >
> > Never, never, never filter a mailing list like mutt-users based on
> > To:, Cc:, From:, Subject:, Reply-To: or Mail-Followup-To: if you can
> > possibly help it. What happens the first time someone bcc's the list?
> > Think about it.
>
> Well, precisely, what happens ?
If they Bcc the list, then To, Cc, and From are almost certainly
useless and it is very unlikely that they set MFT to something useful
either. The other header that I listed is Reply-To. If you are
relying on users to set Reply-To to include the list, you have the
same problems as with the rest. The story with Reply-To is more
complicated though, and is the reason why I qualified my statement
with, "if you can possibly help it."
Some mailing list software will rewrite the Reply-To on every message,
assuming that the list subscribers are not competent enough to figure
it out for themselves. (IMHO these servers are defective, since this
sort of rewriting has drawbacks. As for user competence, I find that
these sorts of lists typically have a high percentage of subscribers
who are Windows users. ;) I am subscribed to a couple of these sorts
of lists, and unfortunately I can't help but filter on Reply-To, since
these servers don't add Sender or (X-)Mailing-List headers either.
Reply-To isn't great, but it is still better than resorting to ^TO.
Anyway, the end result is that the bcc'd message doesn't get filtered
and ends up in your inbox rather than in your mutt box. Now, people
probably shouldn't be bccing mailing lists, but why worry about it if
there is a solution with no drawbacks which also doesn't rely on the
competence of your peers? :)
Oops, I almost forgot to mention why I object to filtering on Subject.
That is almost as much philosophical as technical. Lists which add
[list] to the subject typically do so because of whining from users
who cannot filter except visually, cannot filter on arbitrary headers,
or don't realize that other headers exist besides From, Date, To, Cc,
and Subject. It should be clear from the recent thread about trying
to match "Re: re: [list] Re: ..." for non-strict threading that list
rewriting of Subject headers can cause problems. There are much
better ways of marking list e-mail as such (see above and my previous
post), and if your filter can't handle something of the form "Sender:
owner-mutt" then you should get a better filter. If nothing else, the
subject tag is a waste of screen space that could be used to show me
more of the message's real subject.
Brian
