Subject: Re: How to defeat posting prompt?

From: [email-masked] (Dennis M. Maurer)
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 17:08:52 GMT

All,
This has happened to me, I responded to a public post via private
e-mail and my private e-mail ended up back as a public post. Reading
here and in conversion with the respondent of my private e-mail, I
believe a combination of his hurry and Pine's option was the cause.

BTW - My post was in good taste and I was not embarrassed by the 
incident. I have send other private e-mail, where I would have
been upset to see it go public. 

I see lots of finger pointing and casting of blame, but I see it
very simply...

Pine should NOT offer an option to publicly post if it came from
private e-mail. If Pine cannot reliability determine if mail is
private, then it should treat ALL mail as private and offer no such
option.

If we are to err, let us do so on the side of privacy.

Regards,
Dennis M. Maurer

--

---

From: "Steven D. Majewski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 13:41:54 -0500 (EST)

> If we are to err, let us do so on the side of privacy.

Pine does just exactly what, I believe (from, admittedly my own small 
sample of users), Pine users *want* it to do. If you were able to somehow
convince the Pine developers that your suggestion was a good idea, 
then I'm sure many current Pine users would go looking for another program
that does what they want. Making it *impossible* for users to do what 
they want/need has never been a good rule of user interface design.

i.e. the customers/users WANT email/news integration, and what we need
are firmer more explicit standards for messaged to assist this 
integration. In the mean time, Pine does the ONLY REASONABLE thing: 
it asks the user what HE wants to do with the message. 

[ I expect with even newer ways to reply to messages, like from a 
  WWW server via a HTTP client ( perhaps via an imap <-> html gateway, 
  like the one I've been working on ) you will see even more of this 
  sort of integration confusion. ] 

Changing Pine is not a viable solution. ( i.e. changing Pine is possible,
but it's not a solution to the problem. ) 

Amending the news and mail standards to disambiguate the situation would
be a better approach.  The question then is what those standards should
be, and whether even that will do what you want - avoid a human decision
( that may be incorrect ) about the disposition of the message. 

I think the simplest solution is that the standards be 
tightened to require that "Newsgroups:" means what it appears to mean -
that that message has been posted to the following newsgroups. 

I don't think that change will remove the need for a human decision
at some point in the process, but I think it will be helpful and useful
enough to be worth the effort. 

-- Steve Majewski       (804-982-0831)      <[email-masked]> --
-- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics --
-- Box 449 Health Science Center        Charlottesville,VA 22908 --