(Barbara, I'm sending you this message twice for reasons explained at the end, only to make my explanation clearer)
OK, as I said, let's restart from this message of yours. First of all, I have remembered why my idea of what YOU (Barbara) are trying to do was different from what you described today. The explanation is, again, in this message of mine: http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgNo=65332 where I wrote: > One year ago I become disgusted enough to unsubscribe. About two > months ago I subscribed again. The very first message I got from > ooo-users was a rant (from one of the very people who in the past > had answered as above my proposals for autoresponders) about "how to > deal with unsubscribed users" the way that person and others, in the past, have dealt with unsubscribed users and with me and others who objected is _exactly_ what I have attacked again this morning. When I saw such a message from that same person I naturally thought "by golly, things are still just the same as I left!" and reacted as you already know. So I confirm everything I say about _that_ implementation, but since what you said today does look different, I'll restart from that. I still disagree with you on different points, but they're really not important at this point. The two substantial things I am against are only: 1) demanding, expecting or continuously asking that _every_ subscriber follows the "let's set up the uber-filters to detect and keep informed all unsubscribed users" policy 2) flooding the list with notifications of "copy sent to unsubscribed OP" I am against 1) because this is what ACTUALLY happened here many times and annoyed the hell out of a LOT of people, to the point that they unsubscribed to never come back. If now this is being abandoned, as I understand from your message, this is wonderful. So, if all the people who freely decide to do all this monitoring and notification stuff by themselves NEVER EVER bother anybody on the list who doesn't follow suit, and they commit to keep all the discussion on how to tweak and update the filters OFF LIST, among themselves... we're already cutting out a lot of the useless traffic and flames that happened in the past. Necessary (and at this point, welcome) exception: a once-in-a-while invitation on list, to join the "notification patrol", to keep it properly staffed if and when somebody signs off. On to point 2 now. I repeat the question I asked earlier, in good faith. No matter how formatted, and regardless of their volume, notifications to the list that an unsubscribed OP was informed: - are much harder to filter for those who don't want to see them (I can explain at length, but please trust me on this and continue) - are the best possible way to generate endless flame wars, and I am sure that nobody will disagree on this, as we have already left thousands of proves in the archives. When everything goes well, everybody completely ignores them... except the few who agree to _send_ such notifications. - BUT they still pollute the archives! So if you already agree, as I believe, with point 1 in the sense that participation to the "notification patrol" is absolutely voluntary, why in blazes is it necessary to send them to the whole list? I mean, if you know in advance, as you do, that (let's say) only you and Harold and James want to work in this way and every other subscriber either ignores you or hates you for the extra traffic and in both cases will never send the notifications anyway... can you please explain me WHY you can't send them ONLY to the OP and in BCC to all and only the other members of the group? Seriously, what is the gain? If you just dropped for good the idea that the whole list must see the notifications, rather than the very, very few, already known people who may care to send them, and if you looked for followers on list only once in a while and kept any filter-tweaking discussions among yourselves, off list, then we'd really have nothing anymore to argue about. I could finally stop (unless it's really evident from the message that it is necessary, thus offloading you) to reply-all, you could do what you feel best, nobody would get extra traffic, the archives would be clean... why are we still arguing? As long as it becomes TRANSPARENT to other subscribers and to the archives, I too agree that your activity would be very beneficial for the whole community, without any downside. Keep any notification among yourselves and life will be good for everybody. I still disagree with several of the other assumptions you made today but we don't need to agree on everything, do we? so I will only answer to this because it's general interest: On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 10:21:43 AM -0600, Barbara Duprey ([email protected]) wrote: > "incredibly easy filter" to detect such duplicates; I looked, and > found nothing that seemed relevant. Please enlighten this idiot > about it.) every email message generated by any decent client contains a header called Message-ID with a UNIQUE value (a few clients give it another name, but it's the same thing). If I send ONE message to two or 1000 recipients in the same "Send" operation, all those copies will have the SAME value of that header. And that value remains the same even if filters along the way strip the subject, reformat the message body, add signatures and so on. The Message-ID header is re-generated at every "Send" operation, so if you send a notification, it will be a DIFFERENT message from this point of view. Even if the CONTENT is the same up to the last bit. Check the two copies of this messages that you got directly from me and from the list. They will be different in many subtle ways (list footer, extra headers added by collabnet, whatever), but they will have the same value of the Message-ID header. That single header is all is needed to see that the two messages are indeed only one, so one of the copies can be canceled automatically (even if they are not exactly identical in other parts). This de-duplication can be made automatically, just because the detection of "duplicateness" only works on one standard header. You can do it easily with procmail if your computer supports it. The mutt email client which I use has a built-in function that tags all duplicates and can be set to remove them before even displaying the mailbox content. Thunderbird can do the same thing (didn't test it myself): https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/956 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/17/thunderbird-remove-duplicate-mails/ A google search for the same function in outlook turns out these (some is commercial software) http://www.ablebits.com/outlook-remove-duplicate-emails/index.php http://www.rsoutlook.com/us/prods/prod10.html http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/duplicate_remover/ Marco --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
