On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 3:18 PM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Dnia 17.05.2023 o godz. 15:22:22 Bob Proulx via mailop pisze:
> > This behavior is such that one either loves it or hates it.  Certainly
> > without understanding what's happening it makes using mailing lists
> > terribly confusing.  If you are a person who wants to de-duplicate
> > messages then you love it.  If you are a person like me who wants to
> > see the Received headers in each message to see the trip it took to
> > get there then you hate it since it loses information and makes
> > debugging problems quite difficult.
>
> Problem would be solved if this behavior was a switchable option one can
> turn on and off. Both types of people could be satisfied then. And by
> looking into settings, it would be clear what happens.
>

The vast majority of users don't understand getting multiple copies of a
message, regardless
of the path they take.  They are not going to be checking the Received
headers.  They don't
understand that maybe the mailing list didn't forward the message (if they
even realize what a
mailing list is).  We also have noticed that some enterprise customers have
complicated mail routing
and expansion settings which can result in a ridiculous number of copies of
a single message,
one customer's "notify all" list would result in up to 9k duplicate
messages for individual mailboxes.

Every setting that exists is a burden on the maintainability of the system
and on the customers
trying to understand the tool.  A setting that a small fraction of people
would actually want/use will
actually get enabled by more people than that, who will find the results
bewildering and annoying.

I was one of the people who liked that old behavior when I ran my own
server, but our experience
here trying it out on folks was not great (the cl description to disable
the internal test was "stop the madness") .
Maybe we could have improved feature enough for everyone, but the it was
decided that the effort was
better spent elsewhere.  We had an open feature request for a decade for
this that never made the priority
list.  I did want a message log feature which would be similar to a
per-mailbox version of the Workspace
Email Log Search <https://support.google.com/a/answer/2618874> but that
never quite made the cut either.  In particular, this duplicate message
behavior
did result in a large fraction of "missing email" escalations, along with
folks not understanding filters, third party
apps deleting messages, customers deleting messages and forgetting, and
multiple users using a single mailbox
and not realizing someone else deleted it.

It is also very common for these complaints to neglect to mention that the
sender and recipient mailbox are the
same.

I know some mailing list software does modify messages in order to defeat
the duplicate detection in
Gmail.  The duplicate detection requires that the date, "clean" subject and
messageid are identical.
The "clean" subject is one that tries to remove various mailing list
subject prefixes/suffixes and reply markers.
Modifying the messageid of course would break the DKIM signature, but most
mailing list software already does
that.

Brandon
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