mail to individuals

[Samuel Thurston, III]

Hello,

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Harold Sawyer <hrsawyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> This really feels like a really customer oriented software company,
> like MS?.  The customer is dumb and always wrong.  The customer should
> do it the way the programmer wants.  The only difference seems to be
> that the programmer wants it done a certain way due to esoteric
> reasons instead of laziness or incompetence.

Not sure which you mean by "this [...] software company" but I'm
assuming you mean Canonical.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The "esoteric" reason in this case is adherence to a decade-old
email-list-handling standards document (rfc 2369).  It's a
configuration issue in that most mailing list manager software is
configured according to this document's standards.

Almost every email client under the sun either handles these headers
correctly or provides an add-in to handle them correctly.  Evolution
does so but for some obscure reason only through a keyboard shortcut
or a main-menu option, instead of a conveniently placed button.

Canonical has only limited sway over the development efforts of the
various projects, such as Evolution, which comprise its software base.
 Their higher-traffic lists are configured in the "broken"
non-rfc-complaint way ('reply-to' header) but this low traffic list
where OT threads go to die hasn't gotten that level of attention. :)

Gmail, on the other hand( as I have mentioned here before), doesn't
support the standard, has been aware of the issue (as this applies to
thousands of lists, both high- and low-traffic, worldwide) for at a
minimum 6 months, and still hasn't done anything about it.  So if you
meant that google/gmail is "customer-oriented" in this manner, you
were right on the mark.

Not to say that it's not frustrating, just that the blame doesn't fall
squarely on Canonical/Ubuntu.  If anything, Canonical and Ubuntu have
made strides to get away from the esoteric developer-way of doing
things, if you doubt that at all, go try installing and running debian
woody (the point at which Ubuntu forked away from the debian package
set, IIRC)  for a few days :)