Re: Lyris

["Michael C. Berch" <mcb @ postmodern . com>]

Rather than try to go through a point-by-point rebuttal of John
Buckman's lengthy attempt at an explanation of Lyris's nonstandard
header-munging (and SMTP behaviour), and since Mr. Buckman neatly
sidestepped my question as to whether the To:-line rewriting in Lyris
was or was not configurable on a per-list basis, I think the situation
can be summarized very neatly:

Either Lyris allows site admins and list managers to precisely configure
the presence/absence of particular headers and their contents, or else
it's a $5000 white elephant, and will most likely end up being thought
of in the same light as all the other losing "solutions" out there.

(What comes to mind are the myriad "Internet mail gateway" products that
purport to route Internet mail in and out of proprietary corporate mail
packages and end up simply butchering the messages and their headers. I
think practically all the members of this list know what I'm talking
about.)

A procrustean list server that requires both list managers and list
readers to change the way that they have been doing things (like
requiring that a Reply-To: header pointing to the list be present, or
breaking filtering based on the "To:/Cc:" lines) is simply doomed to
failure.  It really looks like a case of a bunch of software designers
and programmers who are so in love with their clever hacks that they
didn't bother trying to understand how and why the conventions of
Internet list management have grown up over the years. 

-- 
Michael C. Berch
mcb@postmodern.com / mcb@greatcircle.com