At 14:32 +0100 4/9/02, robin szemeti wrote: >On Monday 08 April 2002 17:38, David wrote: >> just think that the way they say >> that leaving the headers in is following standards and that there is no >> option to remove them is absurd especially when that is not wht he >> standards say. > >'no option to remove them' ?? what? > >just edit the source, how hard can it be??
Impossible, in some cases. Let's take an example: pair.com (a very large Web hosting provider, among other things) provides accounts with free use of "pairlist." This is all based on Mailman (v2.0.6 at this point), and so far as I can tell the lists are all administrated through the Web-based interface. If an option doesn't appear in that interface, then the list admin can't affect that function. For some odd reason, pair.com doesn't want people editing the Mailman source that runs all its lists-- can't imagine why that would be. It's true that many accounts at pair allow for running one's own scripts, and that would suffice for many people. For many others, who have cheaper accounts that don't permit shell access or customized CGI, it would be a touch more difficult. And as a last point... not everyone is fluent enough in Python programming to hack the source. Like me, for example. >[1] I must say I really don;t get why there is all this jumping up and down >over what is essentially meta-information in the mail. ANYTHING can be added >to the headers by mailhosts along the way ... <shrug> if you don;t want to >look at them then just ignore them .... whats the big deal? As others have pointed out, there are cases where one may wish to create an "announcements" list under Mailman-- probably because that's what a service provider gives a person, and the source is beyond their ability to change. In such one-way lists, the headers are largely irrelevant and so are misleading at best. It might even represent a noticeable bandwidth savings to not have them, if messages go out with some frequency to a large list. The meta-information headers on the Mailman list I maintain amount to just over 0.5KB per message. Multiple that by 1700 list members and about 50 messages per day, and those headers alone represent 42,500KB of data per day. That's a relatively big deal if one is paying for the traffic. And I'm running it via pair.com, so source editing is not an option for me. Now, I think the headers are very useful for my list and wouldn't want to get rid of them, but if they weren't useful then I'd want to drop them-- in part to save bandwidth, but also to avoid throwing data at the users which doesn't apply. Without source access, I can't do that. This means that I'm a lot less likely to use Mailman for one-way "announcement" lists, or for lists where I think most of the traffic will be in short messages. If I'm limited to using Mailman or nothing else, then I might not set up such lists at all. Personally, I don't understand why it would be such a big deal to offer, as both a Web-based and command-line option, the ability to include or omit these headers. That allows the maintainers to decide what's best for their particular list. I'm sure the option could default to "headers on" and nobody would much complain. Maximum flexibility would be afforded by letting admins pick which individual headers to keep and which to omit, but I suppose that might be a bit much. -- Eric A. Meyer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/ Author, "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide" and "CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference" http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/ ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py