[Techtalk] Munging and Wrapping - Thunderbird and Gmail web interface results

[Akkana Peck]

Terry writes:
> I used Thunderbird and had a conversation with myself on both lists
> using two email addresses. lol One address is a Gmail account and I
> tested Gmail's web interface.

Great data! Thanks, Terry.

In mutt:

Superficially, they both look pretty similar. Initially, I couldn't
see who any message was from (only the list's address showed up in
the index screen), and replying always went to "Real Name via Listname
<listname at linuxchix.org>". So I changed two things in .muttrc:

Changed index_format to use %F instead of %a, to show the sender's
realname instead of email address;
added "set reply_to=ask-no" instead of leaving it unset;
added "set reply_to=ask-no" in my default folder-hook.

With those changes, the lists actually work okay. Replying takes
one more step than it did before, because I have to tell mutt
whether I want to reply to the Reply-to or not; if that turns
to be annoying, I can set it to yes in my folder-hook for LinuxChix
lists and go back to unsetting it for everything else.

Mutt doesn't have the hassles Terry and Kathryn saw in replying to
wrapped lists; it seems to handle that okay without my jumping
through hoops. Or I thought it did -- it looked fairly normal in the
editor, except that for the wrapped message it included the full
headers of the message I was replying to, which was not true in the
munged version.

Including the headers seems bad, since in the archives it will
expose everyone's email addresses to spammers (unless everyone
remembers every single time to delete that part of the message,
which seems unlikely).

When my replies appeared on the list, on the wrapped list my message
was an attachment of Type: message/rfc822, whereas on the munged
list it was just a normal message.

So even though replying isn't a hassle with mutt, I agree with Terry
that the munging option is clearly better.

And by fiddling with mutt settings I can reduce at least most of the
annoyance of munging. I still don't like it much, but we do have to do
something, and it seems like non-selective munging is most people's
preference so far.

        ...Akkana