Does web-based email harm mailman lists?
Beautiful haskell people, Ever noticed the lacunae on some list threads? Someone hits reply and instead of reflecting via mailman, it goes direct to OP. OP notices absence of To:haskell-cafe and adds it back in in their reply to the reply. End result? The thread looks like OP having a convo with themselves. Unless you look at the quoted parts, which you have to click to reveal in web-based email. The convention, say with a google-groups based mailing list, is that conversations in mailing list are public by default. With some manual C&P, you can email responses in private. For cafe participants using web-based email, the situation is reversed, through no fault of their own. Approx 18 months ago, the haskell-beginners list suffered the same problem [1]. After some digging, it looks like there's a configurable option to Do The Right Thing: http://ccit.mines.edu/Mailman-FAQ#25 I was also privately emailed that there are downsides I wasn't aware of: Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html Reply-To Munging Considered Useful http://www.metasystema.org/essays/reply-to-useful.html So what happened in the aftermath? Not much that I can tell. Everything just purred along. Now you might argue that haskell-cafe will just purr along grandly as well given the status quo. But this is a wrinkle that probably needs some awareness at least, hence this email. Would you like this fixed? The list owner would need to be obliged upon. [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/beginners/2013-January/011304.html -- Kim-Ee
On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 04:46:14PM +0700, Kim-Ee Yeoh wrote:
The convention, say with a google-groups based mailing list, is that conversations in mailing list are public by default. With some manual C&P, you can email responses in private.
For cafe participants using web-based email, the situation is reversed, through no fault of their own.
Sorry if I am slow, but are you (in so many words), proposing Reply-To munging? That is indeed standard in google-groups (and I discover now, on haskell beginners); it left me quite surprised when I first experienced it. Mutt handles munging quite elegantly (when From and Reply-To are not the same, it asks for confirmation), but are other clients so gracious? Yes, I am worried about private replies broadcast to the world (and archived on gmane, etc.). ^Reply-To Munging Considered Useful^ [1] is quite patronising on the matter and doesn't convince me:
This is simply not the responsibility of the administrator. People are responsible for their own mistakes. If someone is sending a private email which is derogatory, or otherwise embarrassing were it to be made public, they should probably be sending it directly, rather than as a reply to a public message. They should also pause and think about whether they should be sending it at all. This pause should be quite sufficient for a conscientious person using a reasonable mailer to catch any mistake that they might be about to make.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110305025338/http://www.metasystema.org/essays...
Just to close the loop on this topic: In addition to the public email
below, I received another private one that suggests the same reservation
about being public and eternally archived on a public forum.
Notwithstanding the contrarieties of that position, the nays have it. Rest
assured status quo prevails.
On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 5:25 PM, Francesco Ariis
Yes, I am worried about private replies broadcast to the world (and archived on gmane, etc.).
-- Kim-Ee
My points from the least immaterial to the most immaterial: I am now agnostic to how people define the semantics of Reply-To, so I'm fine with Haskell-Cafe using it or not. This is because I have seen enough of different people having conflicting stakes on it. I still have an opinion on Reply-To. This is because the modern headers List-Id, List-Post, etc. exist and are already in use. Haskell-Cafe has them, for example. They have taken off one burden from Reply-To; one fewer stakeholder group should be contending for it. Ideally, you should instead rally for all email clients to make use of List-Post. (Thunderbird does. It gives me a "reply to list" button.) (Practically, we're talking about human society, it's hopeless.) I am also on a mailing list that sets both List-Post and Reply-To to the mailing list address for the kick of it. This is because most members insist on using old clients, old enough to not know about List-Post at all. (And old enough to be text mode, that's why. They insist on text terminals.) And lastly, to bring the mention of text terminals back to the mention of Haskell: a picture shared by someone in IRC #haskell-blah: http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/x/art/terminal-ghci.png (It occurs to me that it is today's powerful graphic cards that enable fast rendering of yesterday's distorted text!)
On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 5:46 PM, Albert Y. C. Lai
And lastly, to bring the mention of text terminals back to the mention of Haskell: a picture shared by someone in IRC #haskell-blah: http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/x/art/terminal-ghci.png
(It occurs to me that it is today's powerful graphic cards that enable fast rendering of yesterday's distorted text!)
Or even today's; somehow, I am thinking that's the display of an ATM. :) -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net
participants (4)
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Albert Y. C. Lai -
Brandon Allbery -
Francesco Ariis -
Kim-Ee Yeoh