[petsc-users] Mailing list reply-to munging (was Any changes in ML usage between 3.1-p8 -> 3.3-p6?)

[Jed Brown]

Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> This benefit is a bit dubious - as you'll get some migration of
> petsc-maint traffic to petsc-users - but then you loose all the
> 'reply-to-individual' emails from the archives [yeah - reply-to-reply
> emails with cc:list added get archived - perhaps with broken threads].

Thus the canned response: "Please resend your last message with all Cc's
intact so that I can reply to it on the list."

Having a consistent convention between petsc-users/petsc-dev and
petsc-maint would be fine by me [1].

> And then there is spam - which you say can be dealt with filters. Is
> this client side or server side?

Preserving unmunged headers makes existing spam filters more accurate.
For example, petsc-maint is considered to be an important address in my
mails, making it less likely to label mail setting "Reply-to:
petsc-maint" as spam.  This is one of many criteria and I don't know how
significant it is, but anecdotally, petsc-maint spam is almost never
detected by gmail's spam filter, while git at vger.kernel.org spam is
usually detected.

And header munging could be turned off without enabling anonymous
posting.  Maybe we can provide a one-click subscribe-without-delivery?


[1] petsc-maint could become a mailing list with private delivery, but
    anonymous posting, fixing minor annoyances like RT delivering mails
    a second time to original recipients, and setting Message-ID
    matching In-Reply-To.