On Wednesday 06 May 2009 20:42:38 Daniel Fischer wrote:
Indeed. I have reply, reply-to-all and reply-to-list one click or one key combination away, and as far as I know those features are present in almost all mail clients since several years, so ease of replying to list shouldn't be an issue. On the other hand, I do not want messages intended to be private communications to end up on the list, which would happen more easily with munged headers.
So, count me in the leave-reply-to-alone camp.
There is a lot of combinations that can occur when replying to a message on a mailing list. **Situation 1**: Parent Message Header: From: parent@email.com To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com To reply to this, I could either use the following recipients: Reply method 1 (This happens when I choose "Reply" or "Reply to mailing list" with kmail) To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com Reply method 2 (Have to set recipients manually with this) To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com To: parent@email.com Reply method 3 (This happens when I choose "Reply to all" with kmail) To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com CC: parent@email.com Reply method 4 (Have to set recipients manually with this) To: parent@email.com CC: mailinglist@mailinglist.com Reply method 5 (This happens when I choose "Reply to author" with kmail) To: parent@email.com **Situation 2** *Parent Message Header*: From: parent@email.com To: grand-parent@email.com CC: mailinglist@mailinglist.com And to reply to this, I could use any of the following: Reply method 1 (This happens when I choose "Reply" or "Reply to mailing list" with kmail) To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com Reply method 2 (This happens when I choose "Reply to all" with kmail) To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com CC: parent@email.com CC: grand-parent@email.com Reply method 3 (Have to set recipients manually with this) To: parent@email.com CC: mailinglist@mailinglist.com Reply method 4 (Have to set recipients manually with this) To: parent@email.com To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com Reply method 5 (Have to set recipients manually with this) To: mailinglist@mailinglist.com CC: parent@email.com Reply method 5 (Have to set recipients manually with this) To: parent@email.com CC: mailinglist@mailinglist.com CC: parent@email.com Reply method 6 (This happens when I choose "Reply to author" with kmail) To: parent@email.com ------------------------------------------ I'm not sure about your mail client, but replying to lists doesn't seem that simple to me with kmail. The only situations I really understand is the reply to author methods (method 5 in situation 1 and method 6 in situation 2). The others I don't really know what difference it makes. Eg: - If you send to only the mailing list, does it break the message thread? (it seems like sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't) - Do you use To for the mailing list or for the parent? - Do you ever include the grand-parent in the recipient list? - What's the difference between To and CC? - Does the mailing list do some kind of processing of the email headings sent (I don't get how kmail managed to know your message was in reply to Magnus Therning's message, since you didn't include him as a recipient) - Is kmail's mailing list management completely bonkers (eg what is the difference between Reply and Reply to mailing list)? And don't get me started on whether to use html or plain text in messages! (seen both pretty often here) Sometimes I feel I have missed some vital webpage somewhere that answers all this, and I'm just some clueless moron who can't work email yet :( If anyone knows of such a page, could you let me know of it? Google only gives very basic articles when searching for "using mailing lists". Anyway, I can't see why we still use mailing lists when we have reddit, which has all the good parts of mailing lists (nested messages), while it also: - is much simpler to use - allows voting up/down of good/inaccurate messages - allows voting up/down of interesting/boring topics - has a good web interface (mail-archive.com doesn't even come close) - uses markdown (no more html vs plain text problems) - allows messages to be edited after being sent - has rss feeds for article comments, and sub reddit topics - sends notifications when someone replies to one of your comments - and more! :P