Re: [Lynx-dev] (a) list mail format error; (b) broken owner- address

[Mouse]

> >>>>> RCPT To:<owner-lynx-dev@nongnu.org>

> That's not the standard owner address,

It is, to the extent that there is a standard.

It has come to my attention, thanks to a different list that was
exhibiting the same misbehaviour, that GNU mailman thinks itself
empowered to unilaterally impose a different `standard'.

It's not.  owner-$LIST has been the de-facto standard since the heyday
of UUCP, and GNU mailman does not get to change that.  (Since you seem
to think that's not the standard, I assume you don't go back that far.
If you want more evidence than the word of someone who does, go look at
the RFCs.  I searched for owner- and -owner; there are more hits for
the latter, but upon looking at them, most - all, I think - the ones
that actually represent examples of list owner addresses are of the
form owner-$LIST, not $LIST-owner.)

> [...] all the official administration addresses start with, rather
> than end with, the list name.

That's a GNU mailman idiosyncracy, deciding to ignore the established,
albeit de-facto, standard.

Standards work only when people follow them.  I should not need to know
which list admin software - if any! - is in use to figure out what
address to use for the human listowner; that's why a consensus standard
arose.  If GNU mailman hadn't decided to be different for the sake of
being different[%], it would have worked fine - well, except for the
broken antispam measures on eggs; that's a completely separate issue.

[%] To be fair, I actually don't know their motivation.  But this has
    been the most plausible explanation I've come up with for the
    Project GNU deviations from established practice I've seen.

Of course, GNU mailman could also have added a suitable header,
List-Owner:, say, to list messages.  But they didn't; I looked for such
a thing before I tried sending mail anywhere, and I looked again just
now.  I don't know whether it's arrogance, just living in the GNU echo
chamber, or what, but they seem to expect everybody to Just Know that
they think they've rewritten the standard.

Standards don't work that way.

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