X-Message-Number: 3507
From: whscad1!kqb (Kevin Q Brown +1 201 386 7344)
Subject: CRYONICS: Administrivia: Re: CryoNet Options

David Stodolsky said:
>>   (1) We can have a default CryoNet digest list that filters out
>>       messages with special keywords (such as "POLITICS") in the
>>       Subject line.  ...
>
> This is an impoverishment of service compared to the old system. It
> would probably mean "POLITICS" posts would come over on the main list.
> Keep the old setup until the move is finished.

David,
Thanks for your message.  While I disagree with your conclusion (that
my proposal was for an impoverishment of service) I won't waste space
defending my original proposal here because your message prompted me
to think of an even better (!) proposal.

To recap, I suggested creating up to three mailing lists:
    Filtered Digest (default)  - cryonet
    Unfiltered Digest          - cryonet-xxx   <- need a better name
    Unfiltered and Undigested  - cryonet-yyy   <- need a better name
Also, I was assuming that all postings would go to one email address:
    
and those postings would be distributed among the three mailing lists.
Under that assumption some keywords (or other clues) would be needed to
tell the software which mailing lists would receive the posted messages.
(That is similar to the current situation where all messages go to the
same address "" and the keyword "POLITICS" tells the
software to send the message to the politics list rather than the
default mailing list.)

If, however, we use three posting addresses for the three mailing lists,
people posting messages will not need to put any special keywords or clues
in their messages.  The posting addresses for this entirely clue-less :-)
system will be:
    Filtered Digest (default)  - 
    Unfiltered Digest          - 
    Unfiltered and Undigested  - 
To ensure that everyone receives all the messages they want, though,
some behind-the-scenes programming will be needed to do inter-mailing-list
forwarding as follows:

                 ----- cryonet -----
		|                   |
		v                   v
	   cryonet-xxx <-----> cryonet-yyy

This forwarding will ensure that the two unfiltered lists (cryonet-xxx
and cryonet-yyy) will receive all the messages, but that the other
(politics, etc.) messages going to cryonet-xxx and cryonet-yyy will not
be forwarded back to the default cryonet list.  Of course, you could
rightfully claim that I've only shifted the problem from requiring people
to put the correct keyword (or other clue) in the messages to requiring
people to send their messages to the correct email address.  That's true!
But if we choose the names of the other mailing lists (cryonet-xxx and
cryonet-yyy) well, that still will be a substantial improvement.

One more detail.  The From: or Reply-To: field in the email header sent
by the posting software probably should be the same for all three mailing
lists and should _not_ be one of the three posting addresses.  This means
that using a simple "reply" command in your mailer will not be sufficient
to post a message.  You will have to choose explicitly where you want to
post your message.

                                  Kevin Q. Brown
				  
				  
				  

PS: People familiar with how Majordomo normally works may wonder how I
    plan to make it go through hoops like I suggested above.  Fortunately,
    the behind-the-scenes programming will not be much different from what
    I am doing already.  In order to make the digest and other features
    of CryoNet work the way I wanted for the first ()
    mailing list, I had to tell Majordomo that it was a moderated list
    and write software to catch all the "BOUNCE ... Approval" messages
    issued by Majordomo.  Once a night a cron job automatically digests
    all those messages and posts them, this time with the approval
    password so that the messages go to the mailing list instead of
    getting bounced back by Majordomo again.  Thus, the automation turns
    a "moderated" mailing list into an unmoderated mailing list.
    Since my software has already taken control of the disposition of
    the incoming messages, making it forward those messages among three
    different mailing lists as I suggested above should not be difficult.

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