Request for changes in Lyris based Mailing lists
Subject: Summary: RFC violations in Lyris conrolled Mailing Lists
From: <jari.aalto@poboxes.com>
Date: 1998-09-10
I'm a subscriber in Perl-Win32-Users Mailing List at
<perl-win32-users@lyris.activestate.com>. This message has also been
crossposted to FAQ-L <faq-maintainers@lists.consensus.com> to notify
memebers about recent discussion on Lyris.
Recently Lyris has entered Mailing list sofware market with a product
that violates RFCs> These things need to be addressed ASAP. Mailing
list admin at Activestate: Please update your Lyris version and request
correction to following items. If not, there are already RFC compliant
List softwares, (Smartlist, Majordomo, ezlm) that do the Right Thing.
The list of most important misfeatures in Lyris are:
* [THIS IS PRIORITY 1] Message-Id must be kept intact, Lyris changes this
and violates RFC 822/4.6.1. MESSAGE-ID chapter. Broken Message-ID
semantics are affecting other things than just the list. The
established mail archives are also being affected. Those that might
gateway the list's traffic into a mail2news gateway for local
purposes are also finding that the Message-ID usage is breaking new
reader threading.
Lyris mungles the message-id for its own ODBC archiving purposes,
but that's wrong. Use the standard RFC method that says, that Any
user specified field is started with "X-" and move yout message
Id's there, eg X-Lyris-ID . See rfc 822/4.7.4. EXTENSION-FIELD for
information about X-headers.
Also some mailers will ignore subsequent messages with the same
message-id (treating them like RFC1036 Message-IDs) or coalescing
the recipient lists for a single copy (which breaks any
per-recipient stuff).
* Lyris modifies contents of email address put in brackets [faqmail@landfield.com].
This is modification of a body and thus makes DIGITALLY SIGNED
POSTS (PGP, PGP/MIME and S/MIME) invalid. Body of the message must
not be changed, other than adding something _after_ the original
message (like list footers)
* Reply-To: is set to the list, making personal replies impossible for
many people without manual intervention. Please consider
Reply-To: and Mail-Copies-To: header difference.
http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/rfc/mail-copies-to.html
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/reply-problem-list.txt
You can see these issues discussed in FAQ-L
http://lists.consensus.com/scripts/lyris.pl?visit=faq-maintainers
and see dozens of posts complaining about these issues before.
Request for improving interface to Lyris searchable archives
I don't know if the achive perl script that is used to access the FAQ-L
mailing list is Lyris's handwriting, but it's below the standards of
the usual Hypertext searching capabilities.
o You can't see threads (the discussion tree)
o You get uncomfortable (to put it simply: idiotic) selection box where
you can't select items with double click. When you come back from
reading the articles, your're no positioned to the same place from
where you picked the selection in the list box
o You can't download the standard monthly archived mailbox
for anywhere and View and search it locally with better
tools. Eg. Emacs Gnus can slurp in the archive and use it
like any other mailbox. Or tou could run Glimpseindex locally
to find items that you are interested in with good regular
expressions. http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/
Compare the search cappabilities used in Procmail mailing list or
XEmacs mailing list (MHonarc/HyperMail)
WWW Mailing List Archives: -- example of a good archive interface
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists
Mhonarc
http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.html
jari
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