Re: Mailing lists

On Sun, May 11, 2025 at 08:47:40AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:

>> It sure would be a lot simpler to:
>>      Eliminate commands "(un)subscribe" and "(un)lists"
>>      Eliminate $auto_subscribe
>>      Identify messages from lists by List-ID:
>>      Make <list-reply> only send to List-Post:, and fail if it's absent
>>
>> There are more complex possibilities, too.
>>
>
>Relying on List-Id and using List-post would work for most mailing
>lists but not absolutely all of them.  I have a couple where I have to
>use x-mailing-list to identiify it as a mailing list and I wouldn't be
>surprised if there are other exceptions.

Mutt needs to know what addresses are mailing lists to generate the 
header Mail-Followup-To:, which asks recipients not to send duplicate 
messages to you. If <list-reply> gets destinations addresses only from 
List-Post:, it can figure that out, but all the other ways to send 
messages -- <mail>, <group-reply>, etc. -- can only generate 
Mail-Followup-To: correctly if they know what destination addresses are 
lists, and Mutt gets that information through "subscribe", "lists", and 
$auto_subscribe.

I don't see any way to eliminate that configuration of mailing lists 
and still keep Mail-Followup-To: fully working.

We could argue about whether it's worth keeping, but I'd hate to throw 
it away. $auto_subscribe is easy to use, though maybe not complete.

Separately from all that, I think it would be straightforward and 
useful to make the $index_format expandos that identify a message as 
coming from a list (%L, %T, %Z), also look at List-ID:. That would work 
even without "subscribe" and such, and would also work for those 
Discourse messages that aren't detected now, even with "subscribe", 
because they don't include the list address in any destination address 
of the message.