16560 - Shouldn't get same message from different mailing lists

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(mozilla.org :: Miscellaneous, task, P3)

Description

[Matthew Thomas, usability weenie]

If I was reading the Mozilla newsgroups from news.mozilla.org, and a message was
cross-posted to two or more groups, Messenger would remember that I'd read the
message in the first group, and mark it as read when I went to the next group.

Unfortunately our firewall doesn't let me get to news.mozilla.org, so I
subscribe to the mailing lists instead. And if a message is posted to two or
more of the lists I'm subscribed to, I get the same messages multiple
times.

So what I'm asking for is for the mailing list system to take account of who is
subscribed to which lists when sending messages out, so that each person only
gets a given message once.

-- mpt

Comment 1

[Mitchell Baker]

Reassigning to dmose for an idea of how difficult this is (then perhaps to RKO)

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

The thing is, mailing list systems generally just don't work this way... at
least not any of the ones I've seen.  With our current mailing list software
(SmartList), this would be very difficult to implement.  A few mail servers do
eliminate messages with duplicate message-id's at the server, but not many.  You
could try and install such a server your local machine.  Messenger actually uses
some special header information generate by the news server to do the duplicate
suppression in news.

The right answer, I think, is either to get your firewall admins to punch a hole
for NNTP to news.mozilla.org, or to get your local news admins to carry the
mozilla newsgroups.  They are widely distributed with normal Usenet feeds; point
your news admins to <http://www.mozilla.org/newsfeeds.html> for more info.

Comment 3

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

If you separate each list into a folder, and do filtering on Resent-From, you
should get a situation just like news.

Comment 4

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Good point.  Although you would still receive the same message multiple times,
it might not seem quite as annoying, since they'd be in an appropriate context.