"List Server" to Layman and Computer Expert

[Karl Auer]

On Sun, 2009-07-26 at 08:54 -0700, Piper wrote:
> To me, 50 people on the ABC list in Express or Evolution makes me a "server" 
> of the ABC list. I serve as the list administrator when I mail it out. I 
> take the responsibility for adding someone else if they request subscribing 
> and I also remove those who ask to be removed.

If you call it a "server" you will confuse people who might otherwise be
able to help you,and ultimately you will confuse yourself.

Your mail program, where you have your 50 addresses in a contact list,
cannot act without you; you tell it to send emails, then it sends them.
Also, your mail program runs only when you tell it to, and only when
your computer is switched on; personal computers are often asleep,
switched off or not online.

A real mail server operates continuously, automatically and autonomously
- emails come in, it processes them, without human intervention.

So try not to call your mail program a "server" - it really isn't. Using
the right words for things makes the "mechanic's" job a lot easier.
Imagine if when you took your car in for a service you insisted on
referring to the brake pedal as the accelerator and vice versa!

All that aside, you probably CAN get your mail program do to some of
what you want, sort of. In Evolution, for example, you can set up a rule
so that matching emails are forwarded to some address. If you tell
people that an email addressed to YOU with "ABC" in the subject will be
forwarded to everyone in your list, then set up the appropriate rules,
it will happen - but only when you next run Evolution, download emails
and so on. The rule would use "subject contains ABC" and the action
would be "forward to <whomever>". You would, however, need to add one
action for every member of your list, since Evolution doesn't seem to be
able to accept a contact list name there, only an actual email address.

If you feel strong, you could pipe the email to a program instead, and
let your program send the multiple emails. Your program could even scan
the incoming emails for un/subscribe requests and add/delete addresses
automatically! But wait - such a program already exists! It's called
mailman!

> Thus as list server I know it would make the list administration better if I 
> had automatic rather than manual sub/unsub for Express/Evolution.
> (request #1)

A real mail server - or rather, list server - would have this feature as
a matter of course. Evolution and Outlook will not have this feature in
the foreseeable future (never say never)...

> It would also make things better for me as list server if there was a 
> "reflector expression", eg <ABC> in the subject line, which would 
> automatically post a reply from any one list member to all on the list.
> (request #2)

See above for an ugly workaround, but you really would be better off
organising a real mailing list.

> Nobody has yet said these two requests are unreasonable for use by PRIVATE 
> list administrators.

Well, I'll say it now. These two requests are unreasonable for a
personal mail client such as Evolution or Outlook. There is a right way
to do it, and it's a list server. Forcing an email client to do these
things, were it possible at all, is forcing a square peg into a round
hole.

> In plain English, yes they do send to all 50 people on ABC via ISP and 
> others en route. And I am the sender.

Yes. YOU are the sender. You have to create an email and tell Outlook or
Evolution to send it. It doesn't send messages by itself abd has only
limited ability to respond to inbound messages beyond filing them.

> I thought s few new lines of code on the Evolution car might do the job.
> Nobody has said that cannot be done.

Maybe several thousand lines of code. Even then you would not be able to
work around the limitations of running a server on a personal machine.
The point people are making is that the problem has been solved - it's
called a list server. Not what YOU call a list server, what the rest of
the world calls a list server :-)

>  Evolution only presents a nice way to
> > read/send email from a email server.  It is not an email server
> > itself.  In direct answer to your question of:
> >
> >> If they are improved Shaw won't allow them? Is that political?

They will never be so "improved".

> Again, a private list server as I have defined it does not violate any Shaw 
> rule.

True - because it is not a list server in any commonly-accepted use of
that term. They might have a problem with a real list server. The simple
solution is to ask them.

> What is political seems to be the willingness to have two reasonable 
> requests for SW upgrading met as above.

They are not reasonable requests. Though forwarding to an address book
entry would be a nice feature to add to Evolution. Adding code to
dynamically update address books based on incoming emails is extremely
unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.

> Is it so difficult to improve the Evolution code?
> Isn't it for such purposes that Linux was put forward?

Why reinvent the wheel? The problem is solved, and the solution is
called "list server software".

Regards, K.
(the OTHER Karl)

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)

GPG fingerprint: 07F3 1DF9 9D45 8BCD 7DD5 00CE 4A44 6A03 F43A 7DEF

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