Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!eric
From: eric@ists.ists.ca (Eric M. Carroll)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: A basic Wish List
Message-ID: <5727@ists.ists.ca>
Date: 3 Mar 90 23:30:46 GMT
References: <1066@philmtl.philips.ca> <5644@ists.ists.ca> <6319@orca.wv.tek.com>
Reply-To: eric@ists.ists.ca (Eric M. Carroll)
Organization: Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science
Lines: 31

>ACK!  Have you NEVER seen a site with broken news software?  The "Reply-To:"
>field is often set to "user@host.uucp" when it's often "user@do.ma.in", which
>is in the .signature of the message.  

As a fundamental principle of software engineering, I believe in fixing
the broken software instead of breaking everything else to accomodate
the bug.

It may come as a surprise, but user@host.uucp is broken, illegal and
generally wrong. And for expressing this truth I expect to be promptly
flamed by many people who know nothing about mail. [As an aside, I ran
one of the first few uucp-only domainized mailers in the Toronto area.
It all worked and wasn't very difficult. .uucp, like .arpa was, is an excuse
for those who simply cannot be bothered to put the effort into running
their mail system well.]

Lets users deal with what they know best - content. Give the experts a
way to fiddle with the process if they need it (edit headers
seperately). Never inflict expert level content and process on a novice,
because you will pay for your sin by spending all those working hours
you are supposed to be writing code answering questions from users who
don't understand WHY they have to deal with all that detail, and don't
care either.

> I would like to get rid of the headers
>section also.  It would solve several shortcommings of Elm. 

Like what? I have no difficulty with it, and I consider myself a mail
expert.