Subject: ...defeat posting prompt...my final word.

From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 18:39:50 -0800 (GMT)

From this discussion I've drawn two conclusions:

1.	Some people feel pine needs to be changed.  Others feel the change
	is unnecessary.

2.	Neither camp will convince the other camp.

	As it is their ultimate decision, I'm content to leave the decision
in the hands of the authors of pine.

					Regards,

						Ed

---

From: [email-masked] (Matt Messina)
Date: 23 Nov 1994 04:10:32 GMT

>in the hands of the authors of pine.

Actually, this is a pretty good indication that this should be user
configurable.  I'm not going to take a side on which should be the default.
--
Matt Messina
[email-masked]

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Nov 1994 19:30:20 GMT

>1.	Some people feel pine needs to be changed.  Others feel the change

Hm.  I thought it was:

1. Some people feel pine needs to be changed.
2. Others feel nn, trn, tin, rn, and other news readers need to be changed.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 24 Nov 94 00:45:03 GMT

>2. Others feel nn, trn, tin, rn, and other news readers need to be changed.

I mailed myself a news article from nn 6.5b3.  It did not bear the offending
Newsgroups: header.

I do not have the patience to put up with the others long enough to test all
of them.

-- 
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)313-762-9765   ___________________
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst.    /   _____  ______ 
  Flint, MI 48504      [email-masked]               /        / /  /  / /
  Gopher,chimera,nn,tin,jove,modems, free code is best!/________/ /  /  / /

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 23:13:05 -0800

> I mailed myself a news article from nn 6.5b3.  It did not bear the offending

In which case you will not experience the problem.  So you are a happy
user, right?

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 24 Nov 94 12:29:07 GMT

>I mailed myself a news article from nn 6.5b3.  It did not bear the offending

Oops!  I mailed myself with the wrong mode, I did the equivalent of
forwarding the news article to myself with mail ('m' in nn).  I just replied
to this message from nn ('r'), which sends just to the original poster, and
when I got the reply in my mailbox, it does have the 'offending' header.
Had I done a followup ('f'), then the reply would have been put on the
newspool.  Sometimes modality is a good thing.  I have to choose a different
course of action to forward, reply, and group reply.

While I think the inclusion of the header sort of out of band is broken --
it really ought to be part of the attribution line only (which nn does in
addition to the header) -- since all the major newsreaders (except pine?) do
it, I have little chance of changing that.  While it is all well and good to
stand on principle on a matter of design elegance, it still will not fix the
damaged product of your elegant design and their broken ones.

All I want is a configurable choice, based on transport protocol or path,
that refrains from presenting my users with the choice of embarrassing the
person who sent them a private email.

I am leaving pine 3.89 installed, running 3.90 out of my own directories,
hoping for some sign of recognition that this might be a real problem for
real people, while the pine team seem intransigent in their hope that the
rest of the world can be dragged kicking and screaming to their cognitive
map.  I really believe that most people have a different cognitive map of
mail, which comes to you, and news, which you go get.

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 24 Nov 94 12:49:31 GMT

>In which case you will not experience the problem.  So you are a happy

There you go, confusing me again.  If you are going to reply to me both in
my private email and in news, please do me the courtesy of indicating that
to me in the body of the message, something I always do when I both mail and
post a reply to someone.  As far as I know, I am only responding to news,
but with the info-pine gateway, who knows.  See, I don't like mailing lists
either.  If I could I would get all my mailing list stuff with news.

In response, I was mistaken, nn acts like everything else.  What is at issue
anyway is not what happens when I get mail from myself, but from all those
anonymous people out there on Usenet, whose tools I have no control over.

Short answer: no.

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Nov 1994 13:34:10 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis) writes:

>I really believe that most people have a different cognitive map of

This is a *very* elegant statement.

After some thinking, I have come to realize that

     - Newsgroups: header in email
     - Offer to post a reply to Usenet
     - News == email or News != email

are all side issues.  The real issue is this:

     Usenet followups should be sent only when reading Usenet news
     "live", i.e., when a freshly-obtained posting (which you "get")
     is being viewed.  After you have "gotten" it and saved it, it
     becomes akin to email and no more Usenet followups should
     be derived from it.

I'm reminded of a number of sports in which the ball is "alive" (in
play) from a certain moment to a certain moment, and one may score
points during that time.  After some amount of play, the ball is "dead"
and no more points may be scored until it becomes alive again.

Well, Usenet is like that.  One does not followup to a "dead" Usenet
posting, one that has been plucked from the Usenet context and put into
one's personal folder.  Usenet is a game played in context.  One
follows up only to a "live" posting, one that has not yet become
"dead".  Nothing arriving by email is a Usenet posting (though it might
be a "dead", i.e., saved, copy.)  Nothing in one's personal files is a
Usenet posting (thought it might be a "dead", i.e., saved copy).

Pine wants to score points after the ball is dead.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>

---

From: Dan Schlitt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 1994 11:37:59 -0500 (EST)

As we used to say around the cyclotron, "you can make it fool proof but 
you can't make it grad student proof".  I suppose there is a cor0llary to 
this folk theorem about faculty members.

For purely private e-mail communication between individuals one can 
generally get away with blindly replying and not looking at the headers.  
In the presence of mailinglists, net news, mailinglists gatewayed to 
newsgroups, etc. there is no way to prevent the careless from sending 
mail to people and places that they don't intend.  There is simply no 
mechanical way to protect people from their inattention to detail.

In the past I have discovered that when the Pine team has a well thought 
out rationale for the design behaviour of Pine then one must have an 
extremely good argument to get them to alter the behaviour of Pine.  I 
disagree with some of the things that they do, like encoding pure ASCII 
attachments, but there is no benefit in continual argument about it.  The 
current issue is clearly another case.

If you don't like the behaviour of Pine then don't use it.  If you want 
different behaviour go write your own MUA/news-reader.  Bad mouth Pine to 
all your friends.  Just stop this endless chatter on this mailinglist.

Thanks.

/dan

-- 

Dan Schlitt                           School of Engineering Computer Systems
[email-masked]        City College of New York
(212)650-6760                         New York, NY 10031

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Nov 1994 22:21:45 GMT

>all your friends.  Just stop this endless chatter on this mailinglist.

Heh.  It's rare that I find a short paragraph with four short sentences
in which each sentence needs a rebuttal.

>If you don't like the behaviour of Pine then don't use it.

I think pine is a work of genius.  At this site it is the preferred
mail reader for most new users and many experienced users.  The only
reason I don't use it is because I need much more modelessness than
pine can give me, and because I handle more email in a day than most
people do in a month.  (Really.)  I use MH.

>If you want 
>different behaviour go write your own MUA/news-reader.

Won't work.  I don't think I could do as good a job.  It would be
impossible to convince pine users to switch.  They like pine too much.
And for good reason.

>Bad mouth Pine to all your friends.

Why?  I recommend pine to all new users.

>Just stop this endless chatter on this mailinglist.

This is a Usenet newsgroup as I see it.  Please see a previous posting
from me about the conflict between Usenet and email models that occurs
when a newsgroup and mailing list are gatewayed.  Usually it's the
people who read the email who complain about seeing too much.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>