On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 07:23:30AM +0400, Mark Goldshtein wrote: > On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Dave Sherohman <d...@sherohman.org> wrote: > > Granted, for most lists, the substantial majority of replies are > > intended to go to the list, but the greater degree of harm caused by > > inadvertently publicizing private information is, I believe, large > > enough that the average harm-per-reply (i.e., expected harm from a > > mis-send times the odds of a mis-send) is still lower without setting > > reply-to. > > > > I'm not a list admin here, but that seems to me like a pretty good > > reason for the current policy. > > Still see no reason not to have Debian Mailing List in 'Reply-To' > field. People who subscribed to public mailing list undoubtedly almost > in 100% cases want to reply to that mailing list, not to the original > authors. Is that not reasonable?
The position I was trying to explain in my earlier message was that, even though 99% of replies to mailing list messages are intended to go to the list, directing an intended-private message to the list causes over 100 times more harm than a message intended for the list being inadvertently made private. The Debian list policy is, therefore, reasonable, because it minimizes the overall total harm caused by misdirected messages. Reasonable people can (and clearly do) disagree, but that's why I favor maintaining the Debian list policy of not injecting Reply-To: headers. My main point, really, was just that the current policy is not merely a case of "being as mule-headed as possible about this, for no good reason, RFCs-be-damned." There are actual reasons behind it, even though some may not agree with them. That said, some other posts in this thread have mentioned a tendency of d-u members to become irate when replies are sent with 'reply-to-all' and they receive two copies of the response, one privately and one via the list. This does strike me as unreasonable, particularly given that so many people continue to use broken email clients that don't provide a reply-to-list function. Although dual-replying is marginally inefficient, it's ultimately benign, easily ignored, and, if it really bugs you that much, I've seen many procmail recipes posted here for filtering them out automatically. There's no reason to get on anyone's case for using reply-to-all. -- Dave Sherohman -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
