Thanks for the dialogue! On 10/21/10 12:55, Xyne wrote:
Isaac Dupree wrote:
Please don't. Nearly no technical mailing-list sets Reply-To, and in particular neither the Arch lists nor the Haskell lists do.*
I don't know about the Haskell lists, but the Arch lists that I follow use Reply-To Headers
Oh, you're right. I guess I didn't notice because I never tried to reply privately to a message on those lists yet. Sorry. On the grub-dev list which is also configured with Reply-To, I've already twice sent two messages publicly that I meant to be private, thus spamming people like you. (Hmm, I'd think my client could notice that there's a List-Id or maybe List-Post header and therefore warn me if I use "Reply (to sender)" and one of the recipients is the list. Or something like that. I'm not sure why Thunderbird doesn't do that. Would it violate RFC?)
If it's really impossible to use mailing-lists with GMail (I don't know, I don't use GMail) then I guess you should find another client. Some clients have a "Reply To List" specifically, and for those that don't, "Reply To All" or equivalent is usually acceptable enough (are there any clients that don't have this??) (it produces the effect Xyne notes of "Is there a reason that everyone seems to send their replies to individual posters and only CC to the list?", but this works out acceptably in practice because To and CC have the same effect - emails go there -, and because the mailing-list defaults not to send extra copies to people who are already To/CC'ed)
It doesn't "work out in practice" for me. I filter my messages into different directories for each mailing list and having one that doesn't work the same as the others is irksome. "To" and "CC" have the "same effect" insofar as the messages arrive but the rest is not the same.
I think all posts to a list discussion should go directly to the list without CC'ing others the same message. Replying directly to someone else and CC'ing to the list is like replying to one person in a conversation while looking directly at another. Sure, he can hear you, but you're not directing your reply to the right person and it's somewhat rude.
I mean, if "reply to all" instead said "To:" the list and "Cc:" the other people like you, you would be equally annoyed (or almost as annoyed, at least -- the philosophical annoyance would be less bad). That's the sense in which "to" and "cc" are the same. I already gave up on always changing "cc"s to "to"s in e-mail exchanges with the three other people in my family, because my email client doesn't help me (and I've never heard of one that does), and it doesn't make a technological difference . That's a good point about filtering into directories though. In Thunderbird, I dislike being to/cc'ed because it doesn't put the message in the corresponding list's directory; but on the other hand I do like being to/cc'ed because then I'm more sure to notice when someone replied to me (maybe there's a way to set filters so that I notice all replies to my post, even the ones I receive only through the list? I haven't figured that out yet.)
Given, this may be a client issue and in general I think people should fix "broken" software rather than expect others to find a workaround for them, but if a single extra header resolves the issue and is commonly employed on related lists then I don't see the problem. Furthermore, arguing that each recipient should implement a manual workaround each time a message is sent instead of a simpler global workaround on the list doesn't make sense. Neither fixes the problem at the source but one is far simpler than the other.
Does the header resolve the issue, though? On the Arch lists and GRUB list I mentioned above, I have been cc:ed in responses to some of my posts. I think this is because many people without "reply-to-list" functionality have no choice but to get in the habit of using "reply to all" to reply publicly to a mailing-list post (unless they only live on mailing-lists that set Reply-To). -Isaac