[2698] in Athena Bugs
smsuser programs lose big
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (hindmost@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Aug 2 13:35:27 1989
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 89 13:35:10 EDT
From: hindmost@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
I'm not sure who to send my comments to, but
I've found sever major shortcomings in the programs
to manipulate mailing lists. In short:
* You should be able to delete yourself from ANY list;
having to find a list administrator to remove you is
really silly, and I can see no useful reason why you
should be prevented from doing so yourself.
* Every program (smsusr, listmaint, mailmaint) I've
seen to add/delete yourself from mailing lists depends
on a VT100/xterm terminal; try using one of these
from a terminal without reasonable cursor control
(much to my dismay, I'm on an IBM 3279 at the moment)
and you'll see that they're doing something really
wrong (re-sending every screen 3 times, not providing
reasonable prompts, etc.)
I'm uncertain whether listmaint and mailmaint are supposed
to be 'supported', but many students who go away for the
summers use them to reduce their mail; for those of us
far away without an ANSI terminal, they're ridiculously
misfeatured...
-Brian
(these relate to /mit/smsuser/vax/{listmaint,mailmaint},
with whatever locker is generally bound to smsuser; I don't
have the patience to go looking for it over this monstrously
slow connection...)
