Mailing List

This area is for listing all features that help manage the lists that a user is subscribed to. Eventually, OSAF will prioritize this list to determine which features will go in which releases.

There is more detail and description in this section because the features are not very common and relatively complex.

Mailing List Manager

An email client might want a specific subsystem that keeps track of mailing list information, including (for each list):

• list address
• list owner/administrator's email address
• unsubscribe address
• list purpose (maybe by saving the first message)
• how to recognize the list (a filter pattern)
  • Information in List-* headers
  • From address address
  • Recipient address address
  • Subject contains string (e.g. "[Design]")
  • Other headers contain specific information (prior to the specification of the List-* headers, mailing list daemons often inserted their own X-* headers)

Note: Outlook Express for Mac has this feature.

Removal of duplicates

Imagine that Mabel posts to a mailing list and that Chantelle does a Reply-to-All. Chantelle's message will be addressed to the list and to Mabel individually. Frequently this means that Mabel will get two messages from Chantelle.

An email client might have the feature of removing duplicates.

Bursting

"Bursting" digest messages -- unpacking one digest message into all of its constituent messages -- might be useful. (Why do that? Why not make the user just subscribe to individual messages? Because some people don't like getting interrupted constantly by low-priority mailing list messages arriving. With better control over new message alerts, this might not be needed.)

An email client might preserve/restore message threading.

Some people like keeping a digest in one long message because it is easier to scroll through the message that way. However, this makes it difficult to reply to the sender only. (It also means that the subject line of the response is completely uninformative and messes up the recipients threading.) To combat that, an email client could:

• be able to recognize which message is being responded to (by e.g. replying to the message that the cursor is in)
• improving navigation so that it's just as easy to scroll through a digest when it is "burst" than when it's all one long message.

External resources

Mailing list messages:

• request for mailing list manager by DuckySherwood

Contributors

• DuckySherwood
• ChaoLam - 10 Jan 2003