I have  received a couple  of comments  about the editor  business. Basically,
everybody  agrees that  the small  nastygrams  with the  blurb are  a pain  to
discard and should be removed in an  "ideal" system, and that putting the mail
in question in the body of another note (which is what is presently being done
when the editor is a non-BITNET address)  is also a pain. "Resent-" tags would
be fine in case  the note doesn't already have any, except  that if the editor
subsequently  resends the  message to  LISTSERV  (that's the  way most  people
handle lists  where the editor  is just  "filtering" the messages  rather than
actually editing them into a digest), the original "From:" will be turned into
"X-Resent-From" or "Passed-From" or whatever, and the message sent to the list
will say "Originally from LISTSERV@nodeid", which is not very informative.
 
I would therefore like to propose the following change, and hear your comments
about it:
 
1. Remove the short nastygram that notifies  you of the arrival of the message
   to edit.
 
2. Send  the message "as  is", with a  couple "X-Comments:" lines  added which
   tell the  editor that this message  has been sent  to him so he  can decide
   what to  do with  it, inside a  BSMTP envelope. With  the exception  of the
   added  "X-Comments:"  lines,  which  LISTSERV will  show  only  to  FULLHDR
   recipients if the note is resent by  the editor to the list, this will look
   exactly the  same as  now to  BITNET editors, in  PUNCH format  rather than
   Netdata/Disk/whatever. It will solve the double-header problem for Internet
   people, and the note will still come from its original address if resent.
 
In addition, I propose  to add a new keyword, "Editing=  Filter | Digest" (I'd
be glad  to hear suggestions for  a more appropriate name,  I'm apparently too
tired to  come up with anything  sensible). The default would  be "Digest" and
would work  as now,  with the  changes mentioned  above. "Filter"  would cause
LISTSERV to insert "Ed:" in front of  the subject before resending the note to
the editor, who would  then be expected to resend it back  to the list (rather
than logging  it into a  digest file) if  approved. LISTSERV would  detect the
"Ed:" (or  "Re: Ed:") in the  subject of the  resent note, remove it,  set the
"From:" origin  to that of the  "From:" field rather than  "Resent-From:", and
add an  "Approved-by:" tag  with the contents  of the  original "Resent-From:"
tag. This  way all  the messages wouldn't  look like they  come from  the same
person, you could make database searches  on the actual origin of the message,
etc.
 
  Eric