Re: Anonymous re-mailer...

["The Photo-3D List" <photo-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Excerpts from the new header, as seen by a Unix text-based mail reader:

>Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 10:42:10 -0600
>From: "The Photo-3D List" <photo-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: Multiple recipients of list <photo-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: Anonymous re-mailer...
>X-Original-From: ehh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Edward Hosey)

>Well, I braced at the change when I first noticed it (I did not read 
>the e-mail announcing it was coming).  

Was it announced? I couldn't find anything back through the beginning of
March. What was the incentive for the change?

I liked the old format much better - it's easy to tell my brain to "grep"
the "From:" line, and the "programming" is already set up that way.
Finding "X-Original-From:" is a lot trickier, not only because I'm
not used to looking at it, but because there are a lot of "X" lines, and
the length of the title puts the actual address and name further from the
fovea, greatly increasing the amount of horizontal scanning needed.
Also, putting the name *after* the subject line goes against the almost
universal format for messages.

Further, there are readers (and reader configurations) in common use which
drop many of the header lines - people using them might not even see the
"X-Original-From:" line, and thus not know who the messages came from.

The way I look at it, the mailing list is a service, to allow communication
among the subscribers. I care more about who the message came from than
about the fact that it came from the Photo-3D list (which is spelled out
in the "To:" line anyway. The new configuration makes it harder to find
what I'd like to know.

Sigmund the Flying Frog


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