Data Circle

The latest release of the multi-protocol messenger client for OS X office furniture in Bulgaria
has been announced. This release includes a huge number of changes (see the version history for full details) with 188 tickets closed. Admittedly one or two of these tickets are not really improvements or bug fixes, such as Get Catfish_Man a Gerbil, but overall it seems as if a huge number of bugs have been quashed in the new version. There are some improvements to the user interface as well, including the ability to access your contacts list from the little duck icon which sits in your menu bar, although I’m not sure I’ll use any of these.

Needless to say, if you already have Adium then you should upgrade now—the process is as simple as Adium->Check for Updates (which may be run automatically each time you start Adium, depending on your preferences). If you don’t have Adium already, you should definitely give it a whirl. The only problem is that it only works on OS X, the rest of us have to use the ugly Pidgin instead.

Being the hardcore geek that I am, I use the mutt email client to check my main email account. Whilst mutt is by far and away the best client I’ve used—its threading support blows the competition out of the water for a start—one thing has always bugged me. I’m subscribed to lots of mailing lists, some of which set the Reply-To header to be that used by the original poster, rather than replacing it with the list address. There are sound reasons for doing this, but as a user I have then have two options:

1. Hit ‘r’ to reply, then remember to replace the sender’s email address with that of the list (assuming I want to reply on-list), which is a bit clumsy and easy to forget.
2. Hit ‘g’ to reply, and email the original sender whilst copying in the list address, which creates two copies of the mail for the original poster (assuming he is subscribed to the list). This annoys a lot of people, including myself.

Neither of these options is ideal—what I want is the ability to reply to the list address in all circumstances, simply by pressing a single key. Thankfully, today I found out that there is a simple way to do this, which is to add each mailing list to my ~/.muttrc like so:

subscribe man-lug@lists.manchester.ac.uk linux-users@lists.manchester.ac.uk

If you’ve got several lists on one domain, as I have, you can simply use:

subscribe @lists.manchester.ac.uk @lists.evolt.org

Now whenever a post comes in from one of these lists, it gets marked with an ‘L’ (which is not too important, as all of my lists are filtered into individual folders anyway). If I want to reply to any post, I can use ‘L’ and mutt will automatically put the list address in the To: field, and I can still use ‘r’ to reply off-list to the original poster if I so desire. Problem solved!