Re: bugs + rant + constructive criticism (long)
"Oliver Elphick" <olly@lfix.co.uk>:
> I know some people get very annoyed about receiving duplicates, but there
> seem to be few MUAs which will easily distinguish between someone posting
> on a list and someone mailing directly. Unfortunately, the people who
> complain about the MUAs are not the ones using them. This means that the
> onus is perforce on those who don't want duplicates to eliminate them
> before reading.
You assume all extra copies are worth the same. They are not.
There are at least two types of extra copies in the case where we're
discussing (A replies to a message of B, sending a copy both the the
mailing list and to B):
1. A is too lazy to verify the recipients of the mail, and sends a
copy both to the mailing list, and B.
2. A wants to urgently notify both the list and B about something.
#1 is of no use to B. #2 is extremely useful to B. If there are too many
cases of #1, B might implement automatic stripping of duplicates. This
will prevent #2 as well. This is a huge loss to both A and B, and makes
e-mail that much less useful as a communication medium - just so that
that A doesn't have to do a few seconds of extra editing in case #1.
There is also the moral issue that doubling someone's bandwidth usage
and expecting them to do the work of dealing with this is, at the very
least, impolite.
On the other hand, this has been discussed multiple times already, on
debian-devel, and the developer's reference summarizes this in section
4.1 (the relevant part of which has already been quoted). I apologize
for contributing to this round of the discussion, and will now stop.
--
Lars Wirzenius <liw@wapit.com>
Architect, Kannel WAP and SMS Gateway project, Wapit Ltd, http://www.kannel.org
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