> No, it's not clearly been understood for well over a decade at all. For
> one thing, over a decade ago there was exactly one mailing list manager
> available, LISTSERV, and it did not sit at -request. Your Honour, I'm
> afraid the first use of -request for the command address dates back to
> somewhere around 93.
Try somewhere areound _1980_, instead. As the person who invented the
list-of-lists back when there were only about a dozen mailing lists TOTAL
on the ARPANET, and BitNet hadn't even been invented yet, I can tell you
with authority that a [listname]-request address was very near to being
a standard. It was cited in the explanatory comments at the top of my
list-of-lists database as one of the normal things to try if the list
owner didn't specify how to reach an administration point.
The sf-lovers digest and the human-nets digests _might_ have been the
ones to invent the -request address format - Roger came up with a _lot_
of firsts - but my fuzzy memory says not. There were quite a few mailing
lists by that time (what, about 18-19 years ago?), although those two
were the first _digests_ and probably the first ones that really needed
a separate admin address, as opposed to the owner/administrator's personal
email address.
And note that Dave Crocker, who wrote the RFC that's causing all this
noise, was on the _first_ mailing list ever (which, not surprisingly,
was dedicated to email protocols - guess where RFC822 and friends _all_
came from?). I was on that list, too, but not until about 1977, so I
was a relative latecomer. I have the feeling that maybe D. Crocker
can be considered to know a bit more about email than most of the
people on this list. :-)
Cheers,
Rich
