On 20/10/10 15:56, Rémy Oudompheng wrote:

On 2010/10/20 Xyne wrote:

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Is there a reason that everyone seems to send their replies to individual posters and only CC to the list?

The mailing-list is missing an automatic "Reply-To" header that usually exists on other mailing-lists. It makes things difficult when posting with improper mail clients like GMail.

I'll see if I can't fix this during the day. /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 07:23, Isaac Dupree wrote:

On 10/21/10 01:39, Magnus Therning wrote:

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On 20/10/10 15:56, Rémy Oudompheng wrote:

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On 2010/10/20 Xyne  wrote:

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Is there a reason that everyone seems to send their replies to individual posters and only CC to the list?

The mailing-list is missing an automatic "Reply-To" header that usually exists on other mailing-lists. It makes things difficult when posting with improper mail clients like GMail.

I'll see if I can't fix this during the day.

Please don't.  Nearly no technical mailing-list sets Reply-To, and in particular neither the Arch lists nor the Haskell lists do.*  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)

However, that's what is irritating me when people CC me rather than send to the list. The email client I use most often, Thunderbird, does have a Reply-To-List, however that only seems to work when the email has actually been sent through the list. The end result is that my Reply-To-List doesn't work when I'm CC'd. Very irritating that *I* have to pay the price for the bad practice of others. I'll look into the options offered by mailman and then see what looks like the best solution. I have to say I tend to lean towards the no Reply-To munging. /M -- Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org          Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus         identi.ca|twitter: magthe

Isaac Dupree wrote:

On 10/21/10 01:39, Magnus Therning wrote:

...

On 20/10/10 15:56, Rémy Oudompheng wrote:

...

On 2010/10/20 Xyne wrote:

...

Is there a reason that everyone seems to send their replies to individual posters and only CC to the list?

The mailing-list is missing an automatic "Reply-To" header that usually exists on other mailing-lists. It makes things difficult when posting with improper mail clients like GMail.

I'll see if I can't fix this during the day.

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 and none of them appear to suffer any disadvantages from using them: aur-dev: Reply-To: "Arch User Repository \(AUR\) Development" aur-general: Reply-To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository \(AUR\)" pacman-dev: Reply-To: Discussion list for pacman development

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. 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.

* the old canonical arguments about Reply-To munging pro and con that I'd cite seem to have broken websites now, requiring archive.org usage, but here's an updated one: http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html

They were probably taken down by pedantic overload. :P

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?)

I don't know what the RFC says but this behavior is logical to me. The original sender of a message on a mailing list didn't send the message to you (just to be clear, I'm using general "you" here, not personal "you"). He sent it to the list and then the list sent it to you and everyone else following it. For each recipient, the source/sender is the list itself so "reply to" logically sends the reply to the list, not the original sender. I really see it as being analogous to partaking in a group discussion. If you respond to something that someone has just said, it's logical that everyone should hear you. If you want to reply privately, you should pull the person aside and do so, i.e. compose a private message. The point of the analogy is that within the context of a mailing list, the interaction should default to the list, not private messages. Maybe the relevant RFC says otherwise, but this is what I consider the most intuitive.

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 .

I understood that and agreed. I only meant that what happens after that is quite different.

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.)

This mostly depends on the features of your client. I use claws-mail with "thread view". It makes it very easy to follow separate threads on the list as the name implies, including replies to your own posts (and it also makes it easy to ignore uninteresting threads).

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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).

I don't know as I don't use a (noticeably) broken email client. :P I can only say that with claws-mail, it seems to work. All I have to do is hit "reply" and my message goes to the list. It seems to work for everyone else too as I don't think I've ever been CC'ed by others replying to the list.