REPLY TO 12/06/86 21:10 FROM [log in to unmask]: An Additional ACK Option
 
I've already told Eric (offline) in the past that I think it would
be nice to give users the option of getting back a copy of mail they
send so I'm delighted to hear Marty suggesting the same thing.  Acks
are particularly annoying when the list is highly distributed.  You
can actually get more junk mail back from a small highly distributed
list that a larger one which is centralized on just a couple of
servers.  Unfortunately, although getting back a copy of the sent
mail might reassure the sender, that reassurance could be false
since it would really only assure that that it got to the the first
link in the chain.  I'd like to be able to get a copy because in the
heat of an argument I'm likely to forget to file a copy of things I
wish I had later.  My pet solution for the "how do I know that the
stuff got there" problem would be chained acknowledgements where
each server sent the acknowledgments back to the previous one which
waited for them, summarized the results and in turn sent them on to
the server from which it has received the message until ultimately
the sender received one message with all of the acks at one time.
Eric doesn't seem to think this would be easy to do but I haven't
had time to study his reasons enough to know if I'm convinced.
 
To:  LSTSRV-L(LSTSRV-L@CLVM)