Whew, a lot of responses :) and I appreciate all your view points. Thanks to all who have pointed out helpful links and suggestions for MUAs. I could not follow up earlier, as the place where I am (Mumbai, India) is getting pummeled with unusually heavy rains and I needed to take care of a few urgent things. The rains have abetted a bit now. I am aware of KMail, Evolution (my MUA), other fine MUAs and their handling of mailing lists. I am also familiar with list/group searches in Google. A couple of events prompted me to start this discussion: 1) In the past few days, I have seen messages with "please respond to the list and not me." Apparently, a few members are hitting the "Reply" button and the messages are going to the sender i.s.o the list and hence the request to reconsider the "Reply To" header. 2) To convince a client (CEO of a real estate development group) that Linux has sufficient support, I was showing him the SuSE lists site. His comments were "Why doesn't this site provide a search capability? My local newspaper has a Google search box on it's home page." His remarks stumped me completely and hence the request for a Google box search capability on the lists.suse.com site. On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 05:29 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
All of your questions are answered since ages ago on this list FAQ: that might be the reason you didn't get an answer from the owner.
Thanks for pointing out the FAQ. As a small biz owner I have to wear many hats simultaneously, I admit that I did not get to the FAQ - but I have done so now :) Nonetheless, when someone takes the trouble to send an individual email, it is common courtesy to respond within a reasonable time. IMO, 15 days is reasonable. I believe that policies should be flexible and they should be revisited periodically for relevance and updated to incorporate new technology/trends. Interestingly, there is no mention, in the FAQ, on what type of posting (bottom or interleaved) members should adhere to; to trim quotes to only relevant portions that they are responding to. I see quite a few posts with the entire body of the previous message with their own 3-4 lines. A note on trimming messages to the relevant portions would certainly help. Here is a link with examples of types of posting: http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/bottom-posting.html For further reading on Netiquette there is a RFC: http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.html
a) "Reply To" header - each SuSE list must use the "Reply To" header in
For background information see http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
I am not 100% convinced with above and there are counter points as one member pointed to http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-useful.html IMO, this is a preference issue, rather than this is the right way and the other way is wrong/broken. I sincerely believe that list admins, who have chosen the opposite, are equally competent and have chosen it to address the needs of their customers. As another member posted, the list owner gets to choose per his/her preference and we get to live with the consequence of that choice. Neither method is without flaws. On this list, I have seen some members patching the issue at their own end by sticking "Reply To" in their postings or masquerading their own name with "suse-linux-e@suse.com" as the email address! Let us agree to disagree on this one :)
b) Digest mode - provide a digest option when member subscribes to any
Q3. How to I get the list in digest form instead of separate emails? A3. We don't offer digested lists for several reasons: 1) Most of our lists (especially this one) are far to large to make digests useful. Are you really going to read an ~500K email once per day? snip ...
Give me the freedom to choose between Individual or Digest mode. When I am on the road, I access my email @ Cyber Cafes or a loaner desktop at client location. In such instances, I find Digests more manageable.
2) In our experience, digests tend to decrease the quality of list postings. They do this by encouraging the sorts of behaviors that are often considered rude or in poor 'netiquette': replying to mail with the incorrect subject
snip ... This can happen with individual messages as well, when people "recycle" a message and break the thread or respond to a mid stream message w/o having seen all the messages in the thread.
3) Usually, when people request digests what they are really asking for is a way to keep the list mail from flooding their mailbox and making it harder to find and read non-list mail. This is a valid concern and one that is best handled with mail filtering, not digests.
snip ... But Digest is supported by ezmlm. Why have me reinvent the wheel at my end with procmail?
c) Google search bar for each of SuSE list archives. At
Q1. Why don't you provide searchable archives of this list?
A1. The archives are far too large to be indexed by us. Very complete archives that are searchable can be found here: http://www.netsys.com/suse-linux-e/index.html
IMO, from a Marketing/Sales/CRM perspective, this answer creates a bad image, especially with decision makers. The message I get from it: A company like Novell, does not have the resource to do it (hardware, software, etc.), that it relies on an independent third party site to provide search functionality with no assurance of availability. For the past 36 hours, I have not been able to connect to the netsys site. The user gets a bad impression when you point to an independent 3rd party site and it is offline for an extended period. IMO, even if the archive searches were to be outsourced, it would look more professional under a suse.com domain name or a Google search box on the "lists" site. Had I known about this site and shown it to my CEO client, it would have been very embarrassing.
This site is on line. It is functional but the presentation can be improved for better readability. My above comment about independent 3rd party site applies.
Alternatively, you can prepend your search on Google.com with lists site:lists.suse.com
Yes, but I think putting a Google search box on the lists.suse.com is a cleaner alternative and more importantly creates better customer image. The above are my opinions/preferences. From the responses on this thread, I am sure many may differ with me. Let us agree to disagree; I shall not post further on this particular thread. Thank you. -- Arun Khan <knura@yahoo.com> Unix user 1984, Linux user/admin 1994