On Fri,  15 Sep  1995 19:44:00 EDT  "s.merchant" <[log in to unmask]>
said:
 
>1.  The word  "forward" means  a dozen  different things,  as you  admit
>   yourself above--yet the documentation  (and your words above) insists
>   that  one "simply"  uses the  forward function  of your  mail client,
>   implying that there's nothing more to it.
 
All right, if  all you want is to  have the message posted, in  all but a
few cases "forward" will do it,  whatever "forward" happens to do on your
particular mail  system. If  you want it  to look like  it came  from the
original poster (and if you also want to modify it), there is indeed more
work  to it  and I  agree that  the manual  should provide  the technical
details, possibly in an appendix.
 
>2. The second problem should be  evident from the above description, and
>   that  is  that  Listserv's  mechanism  to  "approve"  messages  to  a
>   moderated  list  is  _fundamentally_ incompatible  with  *many*  (I'd
>   venture *most*)  mail clients  in use. Majordomo  has the  right idea
>   here: put  the entire message that  you want to approve  (headers and
>   all) in the body of the new  message, and use a special delineator or
>   password line,
 
That  may be  more robust,  but typing  the special  delineator line  and
password is also a lot more work than the "resend" method. If you want an
even  more robust  but  also more  bothersome method,  you  can submit  a
DISTRIBUTE job to LISTSERV. This will *always* work, but it's quite a lot
of work.
 
>I don't think it's that hard to make  it so, but first of all L-Soft has
>to admit that there's a deficiency in the existing method.
 
I'm  happy to  admit that  there's a  deficiency but  I don't  agree that
there's a simple method that works for everyone and isn't bothersome. The
deficiency is that  there is no clear definition of  what "forward" et al
should  do and  that  some mail  programs  won't let  you  edit what  you
forward. And then there are corporate gateways, which are another matter.
 
The simplest  solution would probably be  to set up a  special address on
some central  machine to  which you  can send  mail with  these "forward"
commands  that  put the  header  inside  the  message  (making it  oh  so
wonderfully easy to reply to the  original sender) and that would rewrite
the headers and pass them on  to the destination of your choice. Multiple
special addresses can be set up for the various variants of "forward".
 
  Eric