On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 07:46:31AM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > The mailman setup that rewrites every message to add the list name to the > subject is what makes it really annoying to me, since I then get a copy of > each message for each list, each slightly different, increasing the amount > of mail to just delete and making threading all screwy when people respond > on different lists. (On Sun's internal lists, cross-posting is much less > painful, since I usually just get one copy, no matter how many lists I'm > subscribed to that got cc'ed.)
Yes, that's annoying, but these are really two separate problems. One is about managing mail, the other is about preventing unnecessary and often inflammatory mail from being sent in the first place by keeping threads away from a large pool of unfocused energy. We definitely do have broad, high-volume lists within Sun, but we also have literally thousands of highly-focused lists as well, nearly all of which are actually used for their intended purposes. We don't often see people cross-posting to XXXXX-iteam and s10-users, and the all-employees lists are all moderated. Here we routinely see people cross-posting to as many as 3 or 4 main Group lists plus opensolaris-discuss, and we don't even have an all-Participants list. The comparison doesn't seem very good. An alternative to global opensolaris-discuss cross-posting policy would be to allow Groups to decide individually whether messages delivered to their lists should also be eligible for delivery to opensolaris-discuss. Or at least whether messages so delivered should have the other list removed from the To/Cc fields (though the latter exacerbates the problem you describe for subscribers to both lists). -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
