Allan Hansen writes:
I was pleased to see the advice below on how to get your own list messages sent from a Google client, as my subscribers complain about their messages going AWOL all the time.
Do those messages really show up in the spam folder without this filter? (I don’t use Gmail).
No. They don't show up *at all*. GMail puts a copy of the sent mail in the sent folder, not in the INBOX. Because it has not left the MUA, it has no trace header fields at all, only the fields required by RFC 822 plus any fields the user has populated. This makes it completely useless for debugging mail problems. It then discards the post returned from the mailing list.
If so, then the server is, indeed, sending the message to the mail client,
I'm not sure what you mean by the server. If you mean the Mailman list, yes, it is sending the message in the case in point.
and the mail client is doing the message ID linking locally, discarding the incoming duplicate.
"Mail client" is ambiguous here. There are a large number of roles involved, any of which may be implemented as a separate program (and the user is always a separate program ;-).
- User == you.
- Message user agent (MUA), which fetches messages from a message store (file, maildir, POP server, IMAP server), displays it to the user, and provides commands for the user to manipulate the message in various ways.
- Message store, which keeps a database of messages received from the message delivery agent.
- Message delivery agent (MDA), which accepts messages from the message transfer agent, and delivers them to applications such as message stores.
- Message transfer agent (MTA), which accepts messages from the Internet, and delivers them to the MDA.
Duplicate handling (which is a special case of filtering) can be implemented in any of those roles, but we can assume the user is not doing it. If she were, we'd just tell her to stop.
Would a change in mail client solve that?
No, the issue is that users want to use a particular client, Gmail. Even if they're willing to change:
If so, then problem solved by a work-around. If not, then how can the filter above work?
If user-defined filters are implemented in the same program as deduplication, then they're just alternative targets for delivery, where deduplication uses the target /dev/null. If the user says "send those messages to a particular folder," that should override the program's defaults. What seems possible here is that Google implements message filters in the message store, and deduplication in the MDA. In that case the filter can't work. But you'd have to ask Google to be sure.
Steve