Re: Change in rmail-reply

[Chetan Pandya <pandyacus@sbcglobal.net>]

From: Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org>


>Chetan Pandya writes:
>> Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> wrote:
>> > Chetan Pandya wrote:
>> 
>> >> One thing I don't like about this command is the potential for
>> >> misuse - unless this is one of the intended uses.
>> >> The problem is that the recipient of the message may have no
>> >> idea that the message is not really received from what it claims
>> >> to be,

>That is in fact the intent of the Resent-* headers.  Personally, I
>like the intuition that "the RESEND command uses RESENT-* headers to
>avoid looking like a FORWARD".

>Obviously you and Richard have a different intuition, based on the
>fact that you don't use resend for its designed purpose, but rather
>because it saves keystrokes compared to forward (in his case, anyway).

Actually I don't use resend at all. The only examples I have seen so far deal
with administration of mailing lists. However, if something works for the 
intended use, but there are instances where it can be misused, it makes 
sense to provide some way to deal with it.

>> Like other commands that may be confusing to users, it could be
>> disabled by default, unless explicitly enabled by the user.

>I think it would be better to enhance the forward command (or split it
>into "forward" and "quick-forward") so that there is less temptation
>to use the resend command as a low- effort forward.  You could remove
>the key-binding for resend; that should be sufficient discouragement.

These are different approaches to preventing users from using the 
command unintentionally.  However, I like the idea of disabled command, 
so that the keybinding is still shown in C-h m, in case someone needs
it and is looking for.

>> Irrespective of what is done on the send side, it might make sense
>> to show resent-from, especially if it is different from from field.

>Resent-From is *almost always* different from From.  If it is expected
>to be of interest to the recipient, then the sender should not be
>using resend in the first place; they should use forward.  On the
>downside of your suggestion, do you really want to see that
><mailman-bounces+chetan-pandya@gnu.org> resent the post for every
>single post to emacs-devel that you receive?  That's what your
>suggestion would cause.

The Resent-From will likely be different from From: in the case of 
mailing list. However, there are instances where it can be same.
From the sender's point of view, the sender's identify if not important if 
"resend" is used knowingly. However, on the recipient side, it is a 
different story.  If I had a choice, I would be reading my mailing lists 
differently. However, to answer the question, yes, I would like to see 
the sender. Just because things are fine most of the time does not 
mean they will be the fields are useless, especially if there are 
bogus messages to deal with. 

-Chetan