> > The recipient list is a pretty poor way to deal with things when you > > get mail sent to multiple lists you're on, and often the To: line ends > > up with nothing at all. The Return-Path: is generally the surest way > > to know which of the lists each of the messages was sent to. I've > > tried lots of things over the years, and Return-Path: is what works > > the best. I'm on a few hundred mailing lists so the matter is somewhat > > important to me. > > On the other hand, when someone replies to you on most mailing-lists (To: > you, Cc: m-l), at least _I_ don't want those hundreds of messages in my > inbox, rather in the respective folders (both direct mail and the > mailing-list version with Return-Path:). some people want the personal copies, some don't. I like to maintain reliable archives of the lists to which I subscribe, and having a separate address for each list works well for that. but it does mean that if a message is cross-posted to multiple lists to which I subscribe, I get a separate copy of the message from each list, in addition to any personal copies I might have received. duplicate suppression is best done on the recipient end. unfortunately for the cause of duplicate suppression there is a trend toward lists munging messages more and more (adding trailers or frobs to subject lines). I have a fair number of filters to remove those frobs from subject lines - not only do they alter the messages, they make one-line-per-message summaries (e.g. from/date/subject) harder to read. Keith