"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by kazinator on Monday October 06, 2014 @12:15PM (#8416648)

> Mailing lists don't include the email addresses of all of the recipients in the distributed messages To or CC fields, and the From and Reply-to is the address of the mailing list, never a list of all users on the mailing list.

Counterexample to your claim: browse the linux kernel mailing list archive at https://lkml.org/

On any message you can click [headers] to view the headers. You can see rich Cc: lines full of addresses. Well, you can't see the addresses because they have been scrubbed. But you can count the commas! For instance:

   Cc: Rusty Russel <>, , , , John Smith <>,

means that it was CC'd to 6 e-mail addresses, four of which were in the "local@domain" format, with no display name, not wrapped in angle brackets.

For instance, exhibit A:

https://lkml.org/lkml/mheaders/2014/9/30/320

Note how "Kernel Mailing List <>" is on the Cc: line, too.

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Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by DonHopkins on Monday October 06, 2014 @05:49PM (#8418516)

Sounds like a terrible idea. Is it a bug or a feature? Why would anyone want to do that? I'd be afraid that some mail readers would choke on the empty addresses, and I can't think of any reason you'd want them, or any purpose they'd serve. It doesn't ever include actual email addresses in the cc does it? Because those poor users would get at least two copies of every reply.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by kazinator on Monday October 06, 2014 @06:21PM (#8418667)

The empty addresses are just in the public mail archive that is exposed through the web. They were scrubbed away by the archiver software. The recipients of the original message got it with all that information intact.

Users do not get two copies because the mailing list software is smart enough to calculate a set difference between the expanded mailing list, and the set of addresses which are already in To: or Cc:

GNU Mailman makes this a configurable preference (per subscriber, I think!) The reason is that some people prefer to get the duplicates. A possible reason is that they want the official list copy, which is subject to some custom mail processing rules based on its list headers, or rewritten subject line.

By the way, some people also prefer to get only mailing list digests. For users who receive only digests, discussion participation is still possible because the discussion is based on the normal To/From/CC mechanism of e-mail.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by DonHopkins on Monday October 06, 2014 @07:07PM (#8418854)

Sounds too clever by half. How can the mailing list software know that the direct reply actually got through to the people in the To: and CC: list?

Didn't the intended recipients occasionally miss replies to their messages, and wasn't it a bad idea to put the responsibility of re-sending bounced (or un-routable) email to the person you're replying to in the hands of the person writing the reply, not the mailing list itself? I doubt it would have worked very reliably with usenet addresses or the early internet with all those relays.

Remember when all the UK's host names were backwards, and you'd route mail through nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk (or uk.ac.ucl.cs.nss, depending which side of the pond you were on), which would swap the host names around on the way through?

The Brits drive on the wrong side of the road too, so I suppose backward domain names made sense to them.

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