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

[Bret Busby]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-plug at linux.org.au [mailto:owner-plug at linux.org.au]On Behalf
Of Christian
Sent: 19 March 1999 17:18
To: plug at linux.org.au
Subject: Re: [plug] Return Receipt on List (was M$ wants you to pay &
Mac to go OSS)


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.

Strange; it hadn't occurred to me that paranoia was an issue within PLUG.
Whilst it is interesting to see the variety of the subscribers, the variety,
and the identities (providing they aren't wearing masks), of the
subscribers, appear to be revealed to a great extent, in the messages
published, and espionage is not my intent. I leave that to professionals,
like Intel and Microsoft, and the police cameras, and the Internet
regulators, etc...

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.

What a strange email application. It doesn't happen with my email
application, and I am not aware of it happening with may others. It appears,
that it happens with Eudora. I understood that a user could disable email
receipting, or, enable it, for all email received by the user. Does your
email application not have this facility?

Am I supposed to take responsibility for the problems that users encounter,
through their choice of email application?

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!

As I explained, previously, I had just begun responding to some of the
messages, after a break. And, out of the three hundred odd messages that I
had received, four responses, surely, is not excessive, is it?

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.

Does this mean that, if I only get about half a dozen receipts for each
message that I put up, as I have done in the past, that only half a dozen
people of all the subscribers to the mailing list, have mail accounts? So
far, I have received about six receipts, in total, for the messages that I
posted today. Does that mean that all the other subscribers' copies of the
message got lost?

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.

The only possible explanation is that some people are using some defective
email application that runs on Linux, from what you have said in this
particular email. In the previous email, you gave no explanation, so I had
assumed that the receipting had caused the mailing list server to crash, or,
do a Windows thing and kill itself, or something equally drastic.

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?

Do you have most of your emails of low importance? Lately, most of my emails
have been of high importance, and, what you appear to be saying, is that I
should manually set the parameter on every other email, for the benefit of
the few.

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.

Similarly, as stated, this is the only mailing list from which I have
received complaints. It is also interesting that, in the 8 or 9 years that I
have been using email, I have not had this kind of complaint, or heard of
this kind of problem, before these three complaints. I have been using the
receipting for a couple of years, I believe, on multiple mailing lists, and
have had no complaints, from anyone, except the three on this particular
mailing list.


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.

So far, out of the 100+ subscribers to the mailing list, I have received one
message about this, prior to your message, as previously mentioned, and one
message since.

Given that the number of subscribers is over 100, that means that less than
3% of one destination for email from me, have a problem.

And, you insist that I change my procedure to suit only less than 35 of one
of my email destinations?

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
_____________________
If more users have defective email applications, and enough have them, then,
perhaps, if I am advised by others of this, I can turn off the receipting
for the PLUG mailing list emails for those poor unfortunates.

Once again, for those poor unfortunates, the receipting is turned off for
their benefit.

Hopefully, sometime, they will get real email applications, or, in the true
spirit of Linux, reprogram their email applications, to overcome this bug.

Bret Busby
________________________