On 24/11/2008 08:38, Tom Hughes wrote: >> There could always be a gentle reminder when reading messages that: >> >> * There’s a wiki; >> * there are several mailing lists > > I can tell you right now that a gentle reminder will have very little > effect. > > I know this because the absolutely vast, exceedingly non gentle, four > language reminder about using the web site to reply rather than email is > ignored by large numbers of people every day. Most amusing are the ones > who carefully strip the notice off when replying without actually > managing to take any notice of it.
Why not go with the flow here and allow replies by email? It's the natural reaction. If you send a message out from the website send-a-message with a random token in it somewhere (e.g. reply-to: "token"@privatemail.openstreetmap.com, or subject: bla bla ["token"], or in the message-id, so you can see any reply is a reply to a web-site originated message, then you could capture the replies and insert them as if they'd been done on the website. So long as they come from a known member and they contain a valid reply token, I think the risk of spam would be very small indeed. I'd certainly find it more convenient to be able to reply to the emails, and we could remove all the other stuff around the message which often outweighs the message itself. I wonder if we could even allow messages to be initiated by email (so we all have, in effect, emails of the form "username"@privatemail.openstreetmap.org or some such. There obviously is more risk of spam, but if it is restricted to say one email per minute and it has to come from a known email address, do you think spam would be a problem? (It someone is determined enough, they can already spam people: you just need a script to scrape the send-a-message pages and you can already do it through the website.). Capturing incoming email isn't too hard: the main issue is language encodings IMO. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
