At 4:00 AM -0400 10/27/00, Jelmer Jellema is rumored to have typed:
I'm an outlook express user. Not because it's free, or it's great software, or it's microsoft (I sure hope the US en EU make them suffer). But because after years of mail, pine, NS, procmail stuff etc. I just wanted a interface based, a-technical program that did what I wanted: multiple-account HTML/TEXT based mail. I know it sucks, but that's because it cannot do a lot. Some other programs suck because you have to invest a lot of time making it work.
Ever look at Eudora? Pegasus? Communicator? Any of a host of _other_ "interface based, a-technical program[s]" that will also fill the bill _and_ may not "suck" (in your personal opinion)? My 1997 copy of Eudora 3.1 does everything I could possibly ask it to do...including simple, a-technical filtering on arbitrary header fields. At 4:12 AM -0400 10/27/00, Jelmer Jellema is rumored to have typed:
2) The relationship between my (now emperical) mother and a recipient of her letter is a different one from the relationship between her and the supplier of a list. equal-equal vs client-supplier. I a want my bread cut in slices at the bakery, I don't want the baker to lead me into doing it, or him telling me I'm lazy.
(*sigh*) To stretch an already-strained analogy close to the breaking point, you are paying the baker for the bread, and therefore have the right to specific services including having him slice it to your liking. You are _not_ paying me to be on my mailing list...indeed, I am providing a service to you for no payment which costs me time, money, and energy. I therefore expect you, as a subscriber, to understand how not to quote an entire digest issue back to the list, I expect you to be civil, I expect you to follow the posting rules, and I expect you to have a clue about your email software. If you ask _me_ to change things because _you_ are too lazy to learn your software, I will politely tell you to jump in a lake. Look, you want to munge the subject of your messages? Knock yourself out. But at least try to understand why I am trying to stop _other_ people from making that mistake.
Are you a man of such great principals that you don't want to tell people how to do these things?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I _am._ I realize this concept may be completely foreign to you, but I would rather educate others in understanding why this is a really bad idea than give them a step-by-step instruction on how to screw up their list. Besides, as I mentioned in my very first reply, this is in the FAQ and is asked here every couple of weeks or so unnecessarily, wasting bandwidth on _this_ list (if I were listowner here, I would expect people to do a reasonable amount of research _before_ posting a question clearly answered in the FAQ; you wouldn't like that, either, so be cheerful I am not the listowner). Munging the subject is a simple thing to do, and all of the newbie list managers think it's a "cool" thing to do since they see eGroups and Topica doing it, so they want to do it too. I'm just giving them valid reasons for _not_ emulating those amateur-hour productions. No one else discusses this other side of the subject (pun intended), so I will...since the recipies to do this are freely available in the FAQ, there's no _reason_ for me to detail how it should be done, and every reason for me to detail why it should _not_ be done. Deal with it.
I do not understand what you mean with this thing about the committee, the democray and the dictatorship.
I'm not surprised.
aha, yes, I can see the instructor in you :).
As I mentioned in my first message responding to you, I am not particularly interested in instructing you, since you have shown you will take the exact opposite position of _anything_ I say, and have proven in the past you would rather have other people do your work for you than learn how to do it on your own, thereby losing my respect. Given this, I am only interested in supplying to the other subscribers on this list a counterpoint argument to pandering to the lowest-common denominator subscriber, and dragging their lists down to that subscriber's level....what _you_ do with _your_ lists is completely irrelevant to me. I am now quit with this discussion; if you feel the need to further beat this dead horse, you are welcomed to do so alone. Charlie