I shifted your message around, Leonard, such that the more important topics
are on top.
On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 07:44:06PM +0100, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> All in all you haven't really explained why using reply-to is such a bad
> thing, apart from the fact that originally mail-followup-to was intended
> for this use.
Personal responses should be to Reply-To:, and then From:. Group responses
should be to Mail-Followup-To:, then To: + Cc:. List responses should be to
the list alone.
I rarely ever choose 'list response', as most forums that I am
subscribed to are 'open'. You don't need to be a member in order to
post. Therefore, if I were to 'list respond', any people on the To: or
Cc: lists who were *not* subscribed, would *never* see a response. The
'group response' functionality in my mail client provides for this,
and allows the sender to instruct my client how to perform. Anybody who
can put enough effort in to complain about receiving duplicates, can put
in effort to set Mail-Followup-To: and solve the problem *properly*
without any need to make demands.
Unless I see a strong reason to do otherwise, I will not issue a
private response, or a list-only response. Candidates for a private
response would include off-topic discussions or queries. Candidates
for list-only responses would include specifically keeping off-list
participants from seeing my response. A few times a year (very
infrequently), I occasionally selectively update the To: and Cc: after
issuing a group response. I refuse to do this on a regular basis, for
the sake of my sanity.
Reasons as to why I *prefer* to receive duplicate copies:
Posters sometimes change the subjects of a message when responding. While
some people may have the time in their day to read *every single message*,
I do not. I frequently delete entire threads with my criteria based solely
on the Subject or author of the message. If the message is a response to me,
but with a changed subject, I may *miss* it entirely. Receiving a response
in my INBOX as well as my 'redhat' box (in this case) allows me to read the
message, and pay closer attention to messages with the same subject. My
mail client (mutt) does provide a header flag that indicates whether the
message is addressed to me, or whether it is address to a list that I
subscribe to. If receiving two copies of the message became annoying, I
would use procmail (or an alternative) to filter duplicates, but *still*
be able to tell that the message is addressed to me as well as the list (as
opposed to just a list only message).
If a person wants to specifically ask *me* a question (unlikely on this list,
but possible on others), I want to be on the To: or Cc: list for the same
reasons as the above paragraph. (This is in the case of a new post, or a
response where somebody explicitly *adds* me to the Cc: list - just commenting
that this situation is not unique to followups...)
Mailing lists go down, or can become bogged down. I frequently see
responses to messages that I have posted minutes, or hours earlier
than I see the message reach the list. It is inefficient to hold some
discussions with intervals of an hour or more between responses. If I and
a person discuss it Cc:'ing each other, the mailing list may have the
entire correspondance available to the other members of the list within
a few hours, rather than a few days, making it easier for *everyone* to
keep track. (I prefer it in the case that I am personally involved, *and*
in the case that I am an observer)
On mailing lists such as linux-kernel, it is generally understood that
a patch should always copy both the maintainer _and_ the list, even if
it is known that the maintainer monitors the list. This is for reasons
that I listed above. The same is also true of Cc:'ing in response. If
you don't Cc: Linus on a response to Linus, you risk it not being
seen. He is a busy man... :-)
> > It isn't widely used primarily because people refuse to use it. For
> > example, I point out yourself.
> To be honest, I never heard of mail-followup-to before ;-) . It doesn't
> occur very often in the 100,000's of mails in my archive.
There are many neat features that can be found in the RFC's that have been
overlooked for years (or decades). The people who wrote the RFC's may have
been geeks that nobody cared about at the time, but they *did* think of
many things a long time before the issues became significant.
> By the way, I didn't really mind your top posting, just noticed the
> discrepancy between this off list reply and your on list reply behaviour.
Part of being human. A robot would be more consistent, if only for the sake
of consistency... I choose to show a little flavour! :-)
> > Copying private communication back to a list, on the
> > other hand, is recognized as being quite rude.
> I had considered that, that's why I apologized in advance. However, I
> didn't think the things you wrote to me were of such nature that they would
> embarrass you if I sent them back to the list. Please accept my apologies
> if I was wrong. No offense was intended and I did consider whether or not
> this action was appropriate. Maybe I misjudged.
No offense taken at all. I was being pedantic in response to pedantic. :-)
I hope this was enlightening... Cheers,
mark
--
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