On Fri, Jul 28, 2000 at 01:47:47PM -0400, Charlie Summers wrote:
Roger;
PLEASE understand this is not directed toward you, although I am using your letter as a starting point for my own, since your views seem to be in many cases the majority view of those on the list.
Point taken. Actually, I don't think you've quite seen my views; what I'd like to do is seduce the poor suckers who think the web's the answer to everything into using a decent, solid mailing list package such as SL, by making it a bit easier for them to do so; then, once they're hooked, get them thinking about the _real_ stuff, hand-hacked procmail recipes and so on. See also the end of this message.
You're right, having written a couple of 'em myself for different (and inept) clients. But it's even _more_ trivial to simply send an X-Command: via email and be done with it. No, really, it's simple. Mind numbingly easy. Why does everyone make it so tough?
Because people these days have horribly incomptently written MUAs which try to hide this sort of nasty technical thing from them. (Heavy irony.)
Why would you bother to do something like that, when SmartList already handles it quite nicely? If you're going to waste the time doing that, you should probably just write a new mailing list software package and be done with it.
Actually, I'm giving serious thought to that anyway - an ML package talking to a database back-end would be interesting to write.
As for the user side, how would you prevent malicious foreign unsubscriptions without a password? The existing "confirm" patch from aks would be helpful, here. You mean _is_ helpful here. It already exists; why re-invent it?
Yes; the thing is, I don't think it would be _optional_ any more. Anything that lets people unsubscribe arbitrary addresses by mail is open to abuse; but if they can do it by web, it _will_ be abused, because you've just opened it up to all the real idiots out there.
And at the risk of alienating three quarters of the subscribers to this list, I have to say that if you can't figure out how to use an X-Command, given all the examples all over the place (see the Manual and the .examples directory), you shouldn't be running _any_ mailing list server. Use Topica or eGroups and save yourself a lot of grief. If you don't understand the simple concept of the X-Command, you shouldn't be adminning _anything._
I agree entirely! On the other hand, I want to see the spammers that are Topica and Egroups go out of business.
Look, folks, if maintaining SmartList were difficult, I'd understand all the hand-wringing about Web-based tools. But good grief, it pretty much maintains _itself,_ and the maintainer only has to get involved occasionally when the potential subscriber is unable to follow simple subscription instructions, or the procbounce routines can't figure out the address because a Lotus Notes mail server doesn't know how to send a properly-formatted bounce. So where exactly is the tremendous _need_ for Web-based maintenance packages?
Because if SL doesn't have the checkboxes, people will go instead to egroups and get bombarded with spam; or majordomo and have their systems flushed by crackers; or mailman and _only_ be able to do useful stuff via the web interface. (Such, at least, is my experience of mailman lists.) I want to see things done _right_. If that means adding a few bits of candy on top of the pill to make it more palatable, so be it - you can always take them off again if you're able to face the real thing. R -- Roger Burton West -/- roger@firedrake.org http://firedrake.org/roger/ "And we're bound for the border, we're soldiers of fortune; And we'll fight for no country but we'll die for good pay."