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"redirect" command in Eudora
``` I've enclosed another message about Eudora, mailed off to the Risks Digest just now. It's more accurate and better thought out than yesterday's, due mostly to the helpful comments of several RRE readers. Please take note that I'm not saying that Eudora is a Bad Thing, only that it has a misleading feature that causes me grief.
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 11:21:30 -0800
From: Phil Agre
I run a large mailing list with roughly 2300 readers worldwide, to which I simply send whatever I find interesting. Very often the people on the list find the things I send interesting too, and so they pass them along to their friends, or to other mailing lists. Which is fine.
However, increasingly over the last few months I have been plagued with a recurring problem. People who use the Eudora mail reading program will use the "redirect" command to pass my message along. Eudora has another equally accessible command called "forward", but I'm told that many people don't use it because it generates unsightly ">"'s at the beginning of each line of the forwarded message, or simply because they don't understand the difference.
The difference, though, is important. Redirected messages end up with a From: field that looks like this:
From: pagre@weber.ucsd.edu (by way of whoever@whatever.edu)
The reason some people like this feature is so that replies to the message will automatically go to the person who sent it, and not to the person who passed it along. (I don't know if this is more or less confusing than the usual "Resent-From:"; all I know is that it's messages in this format that are causing me trouble.)
The problem is that Eudora also invites the user to add their own text to the message by creating an editable window with my text inside. A large number (maybe a small proportion, but a large enough number out of the thousands who get messages from my list) take the opportunity to add their own text to this window, very often an explanation to their friends or colleagues about why they found that particular message interesting. Sometimes they sign these extra notes and sometimes they do not. In any case the message goes out with my name on it and often gets forwarded further. I'm sure that this is not deliberate fakery, but that doesn't change the outcome, which is that words end up getting ascribed to me that I did not write. Nothing terrible has happened because of this yet, but it is clearly an accident waiting to happen.
After the third such occurrence in one week, I complained on my mailing list, suggesting that Eudora's maintainers be petitioned to remove the offending feature. This was obviously a mistake, since every feature has its following. What really surprised me (though it shouldn't have) was the large number of responses blaming the users who are misled by the interface. The Eudora developer who responded to my message was unsympathetic. The "by way of" in the From: field is apparently consistent with the standard (this shouldn't surprise me either). And I am told that other mailers have annotated forwarding features.
The fact is, though, that it's Eudora that causes me these problems. And I really do feel that this feature is not reasonable. If a mail reader is going to generate a message representing itself as having originated with me, it should not make it easy for a user to add their own text to that message. If some good reason exists for adding text to redirected messages, then the mail reader should automatically generate markings that clearly distinguish this additional text from my own original text.
Lots of people have been telling me how lovely Eudora is, and it sure does sound like a good thing. But when you keep on adding features to something, sometimes those features create affordances that should not exist.
Phil Agre, UCSD ```
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