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[Followups set to lugnet.admin.general]
[This message is also being e-mailed to news-by-mail subscribers]
The Quick Summary
=================
The format of the 'From' lines on news-by-mail messages is improving to be
more useful and intuitive. However, it means that if you have mail filters
set up to filter messages based on the 'From' field, you will need to edit
your mail filters so that they filer based on the 'To' field instead. If
you're not filtering incoming mail, or you're already filtering things based
on the 'To' or 'Cc' field, then you're all set.
The Explanation
===============
When the news-by-mail feature was added last November, it seemed like the
safest thing to do was to convert the 'From' fields of news messages so
that they included the group name as well as the poster's name, for example:
From: lugnet.announce (Mike Stanley)
instead of
From: cjc@NOSPAMnewsguy.com (Mike Stanley)
This conversion made follow-ups cleaner and simpler to implement in the
gateway, and also guaranteed that outgoing messages would be accepted by
other mailing lists such as the lego-robotics@crynwr.com list.
But it turns out that the lego-robotics@crynwr.com list actually doesn't
reject messages from people it doesn't recognize after all, and by adding
some extra smarts to the news-by-mail gateway, it was possible to include
the actual poster's address and still have 'Reply-To' work as a substitute
for 'Followup-To' in advanced usage.
So -- what does this mean to you? It means you can now reply to someone
directly instead of having to reply to the group. But you can also reply
to someone -and- to the group if you have separate Reply and Reply All
options in your e-mail software. This is much closer to how real mailing
lists work.
For example, you might now receive a message that starts like this:
To: lugnet.general@lugnet.com
From: cjc@NOSPAMnewsguy.com (Mike Stanley)
If you're using (for example) Netscape Messenger for e-mail, then when you
click Reply, you'll be writing just to Mike privately. But if you click
Reply All, then you'll be replying to Mike and to the newsgroup. Before,
what happened is that you could only reply to the group.
BTW, Mike's original 'Reply-To' header in his news-posting (giving his
un-spamblocked e-mail address) would be preserved in the message you
receive by e-mail, so that you don't have to delete 'NOSPAM' after clicking
Reply. (Note that un-spamblocking in replies only occurs automatically when
the original poster included his/her true e-mail address in the 'Reply-To'
field.)
--
Todd Lehman
p.s. Gateways to external mailing lists such as ba-lego@cinnamon.com are
still configured to convert the 'From' line to guarantee acceptance of
outgoing messages.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Slight change in gateway addressing method
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| (...) Does that mean you the original sender would receive the same reply twice? Personally, I think the l-cad list method is best - you see the sender's names (which is great!) but the Reply-To is set to the newsgroup. That way I don't accidently (...) (25 years ago, 23-Jan-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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