[META] The issue of the unwelcome CC

[Werner Koch]

Hi,

Let me quote from the Gnus manual, which explains how some think it
should be handled.

  Sometimes while posting to mailing lists, the poster needs to direct
  followups to the post to specific places.  The Mail-Followup-To (MFT)
  was created to enable just this.  Three example scenarios where this is
  useful:
  
     * A mailing list poster can use MFT to express that responses should
       be sent to just the list, and not the poster as well.  This will
       happen if the poster is already subscribed to the list.
  
     * A mailing list poster can use MFT to express that responses should
       be sent to the list and the poster as well.  This will happen if
       the poster is not subscribed to the list.
  
     * If a message is posted to several mailing lists, MFT may also be
       used to direct the following discussion to one list only, because
       discussions that are spread over several lists tend to be
       fragmented and very difficult to follow.
  
  
     Gnus honors the MFT header in other's messages (i.e. while following
  up to someone else's post) and also provides support for generating
  sensible MFT headers for outgoing messages as well.
  
The basic rule is that the first poster to a thread decides what to do,
any later reply may change that - but only by adding CC headers.
Without that rule some may miss a mail.  Gnus considers a missed mail
more serious than a duplicated mail.

If you delay mail receiving for a a few minutes, it is possible to use
the message-id to filter out the duplicates.  Well, this does not work
always (e.g. due to greylisting) but it has the ability to remove
duplicates in many cases.  For many years I used Gnus internal mail
splitting which handles duplicates suppression very well.  Meanwhile I
switched back to procmail and a local imapd.  This does not have the the
full Gnus filtering and I also did not implemented the above strategy.
It doesn't harm - I check my general folder for important messages and
then turn to the mailing lists.  By reading the mailing lists the
duplicates in the general mail folder will also be marked.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner


ps.
Things which annoy me much more than CCs are: top posting, not stripping
long quotes, missing to insert a "was:" after changing the subject, and
changing the name part of the address to include the list name.


-- 
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