[plug] Return Receipt on List (was M$ wants you to pay & Mac to go OSS)

[Christian]

Bret Busby wrote:
> What is the problem with the receipting?
> I use the receipting as a default, as the nature of some of the emails that
> I send to places apart from the mailing list, warrants receipting. It shows
> that people have received the emails, and, where provided, when the emails
> are received, and when the recipient displays the emails. That gives me
> recourse, when the recipients neither acknowledge, nor respond to, highly
> important emails.
> I have, in the course of sending emails, sent emails to various types of
> mail servers, including Microsoft, UNIX, and Linux, and have had no
> complaints, apart from the one below, and the previous one that I received,
> to which you refer. I was going to query the previous one, but, in the
> download of about three hundred emails from the PLUG mailing list alone, at
> one time, parsing them manually, and responding, takes a while.
> I understood that Linux is supposed to be more resilient than other
> operating systems, so I am concerned that the receipting appears to cause a
> problem only on this mailing list.
> I subscribe to a number of mailing lists, with the others being unrelated to
> Linux, and have had no reported problems with anyone else.
> Thus, I ask for an explanation.
> I have turned off the receipting manually, for this email, but am concerned
> that this mailing list is so delicate.
> A response would be appreciated.

Perhaps my understanding of the way receipting works is wrong (in which
case tell me) however I can see a number of reasons why such a practice
is uncalled for on a mailing list.  The first and most obvious reason is
that it's blatantly totally unnecessary.  You know that the mail reached
the mailing list because you're on the mailing list and will receive a
copy!  You don't need to know when every member of the mailing list
receives your email, in fact, many might regard it as an invasion of
privacy for this to happen since it reveals (as I understand it) when
they read the email, what their email address is and, of course, their
presence on the list - naturally this isn't much of an issue on this
list but there are some lists on which it is.  It's also irritating to
have my mail client ask me continually if I want to send a return
receipt to every email that I receive from you - especially since as
I've pointed out it's totally unnecessary.  I would also have thought
that in most cases that you wouldn't want to receive a return receipt
from every member of a mailing list when you post (and I think you
posted three or four times today! I think they're over 100 people on
PLUG so that's 400 emails that are just pointless receipts...). 
Obviously it's a waste and, as I've pointed out, totally unnecessary.

You seem to be under the impression that return receipting causes some
problem for Linux - I don't think so (although I'm not sure if it's a
standard feature - someone else doubtless knows) and this is certainly
not the issue.

You say that you use receipting because "some of the emails" you send to
places other than the mailing list warrant it - wouldn't it make more
sense to switch on receipting for these emails?

Anyway, I may have the whole concept of receipting totally wrong (in
which case I'll be happy to have it explained to me) but I know for sure
that despite being on a large number of lists of varying sizes for many
years, your emails are the only ones on any list that I've ever
encountered that have return receipts enabled.  This fact and my present
understanding of return receipts suggests that they're totally
unwarranted on a mailing list.  And also given the fact that a previous
request on the list for you to switch them off wasn't from me, I suspect
that I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
========================================================================
I'm not trying to give users what they want, I'm trying to give them
freedom, which they can then accept or reject. If people don't want
freedom, they may be out of luck with me, but I won't allow them to 
define for me what is right, what is worth spending my life for.
                                                    - Richard Stallman