brennan@rtp.dg.com (Dave Brennan) (03/07/90)
In article <5727@ists.ists.ca> eric@ists.ists.ca (Eric M. Carroll) writes: > I would like to get rid of the headers >section also. It would solve several short commings of Elm. Like what? I have no difficulty with it, and I consider myself a mail expert. Like, how about return receipts? When I send mail inside my own domain I'm confident enough that it will get to where I send it. However, when I send mail to the outside world, I usually want a return receipt (unless it's to a site I send to regularly). I'm sure you've already thought, "That's what the user-defined header is for." I started using the user defined header for this purpose, but quickly tired of typing "Return-Receipt-To: brennan@rtp.dg.com" every time I wanted a return receipt on a message. My solution was to add a header to the header screen that is initially blank, but gets filled in with a default value set in my elmrc file if I choose to edit it. (I also added an elmrc option which when ON always fills in the return receipt header.) However, this is just a hack to solve my problem. (Amazingly, though, I've been able to apply the last four or five patches without any problems!) Maybe what people want to do can be classified into these three areas: 1) Novice users don't/shouldn't see headers in their editor when they send a message, but may want to view/edit them from the headers screen on occasion. 2) Some users may need to routinely edit/use a few headers (like return receipt) but usually don't care about the other headers. 3) Bonified mail gurus want to see headers in their editor (probably Emacs :) and be able to edit the headers there for every message. If I only had time to implement it (maybe in a few months), I'd set up an elmrc option to indicate if I wanted headers available when editing, then use the elmheaders file to specify the following: 1) Which headers I wanted to see in my editor or on the headers screen. (Elm could provide a default headers file for first time users with the .elm directory.) 2) Default values for headers that aren't different for each message. (Well, I suppose you could specify a default for "To," but Elm would just override it.) 3) A flag indicating where the header would appear. The possibilities are to (a) use the value specified in the elmrc file (ie: header screen vs editor), (b) always place the header in the editor, (c) never place the header in the editor, (d) always include the header in outgoing mail, but never show it anywhere (for headers like "Organization"). Option (d) would cause behavior like the current implementation of the elmheaders file. 4) A flag to indicate whether the default value should be always filled in, or only when edited. (This mainly applies the the header screen, but could also be used to mean if this empty header is used in the editor, fill in the default value.) This is feature is useful for the return receipt business mentioned above. If this feature wasn't present it would be possibly to accomplish similar functionality by using flag (b) above, and deleting the line in the editor when you don't want to use it. If return receipt is the only header that this flag would be used for, it might make more sense to have Elm (optionally) include it for out-of-domain messages, since Elm already does something similar with signatures. That's my 2 cents worth... -- _________ Dave Brennan, User Interfaces, Data General Corp. / brennan@dg-rtp.dg.com Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 27709 / ...mcnc!rti!dg-rtp!brennan Hm: (919) 460-5725 Wk: (919) 248-6330 _________/ dave_brennan@rpitsmts.bitnet