Quoting Steve Litt (sl...@troubleshooters.com):
> My claws-mail has a reply-to-list, which *usually* does the right thing
> (it did for replies to you, Daniel Taylor, Anthony Stone and Hendrik
> Boom. Some folks messages my Reply-to-list includes them.
Reply-to-list is basically an enhancement to reply-all. I didn't want
to indulge gory detail, but when I spoke of mutt and GNUS doing
intelligent mailing list handling on replies, that was exactly an
implementation of reply-to-list. I'm not at all surprised that
claws-mail has also picked up the idea and implemented it in some
fashion, as those guys very much have clue, too.
> Personally I do that, and I don't think it's an imposition. I don't
> want my listmates getting dups.
I wish you luck at that. In my experience, it doesn't work because most
computer users never do pratically anything that differs from defaults,
and also because they cannot bother attempting manual operations for
some people's benefit.
> But what really strokes my fur the wrong way are these guys who reply
> to me, and cc the list. Saaaaay whaaaaaat? Why?
I already tried to explain that.
If Joe User's MUA[1] follows commodity standards, and isn't trying to be
extra-clever about mailing lists as mutt, GNUS, and (you say) Claws Mail
do, then Joe can either do reply-all or reply-sender.
Reply-sender (usually labeled as 'Reply') generates a response back only
to you, the antecedent sender -- to your Reply-To address if you
provided one, or to your sender ('From:') address if you didn't.
Reply-all tallied up all of the recipients that were on To and Cc of the
antecedent mail and... uses all of them. All. Including the address of
the mailing list. Most MUA software doesn't have any idea that a
mailing list's SMTP address ought to be treated specially during
requested replies. To most MUAs, an address is an address is an
address. You hit reply-all, and one of the many listed recipients was
dng@lists.dyne.org? OK, then your reply-all generated draft includes
among the reused, duplicated roster of the previous poster's recipients,
dng@lists.dyne.org. It's really that simple. The user said 'reuse all
of those addresses from the prior mail', and the MUA does so.
So, I'm puzzled about why you think the outcome, where the mailing list
address continues to be a recipient because it was a recipient last
time, and the previous sender is a (direct) recipient for the reply
because he/she was one of the addresses (the sender) in the previous
mail, is surprising. Reply-all picks up and reuses all the prior
addresses. Both of those were among those in the prior mail, so they
get reused. All means all.
If you essentially mean, 'But reply-to-list is MoreBetter[tm]', then I
agree. That's part of the reason I'm a mutt user, and presumably part
of the reason you're a Claws Mail user. It'd be a nicer world if
everyone else also used mutt, GNUs, or (according to your account),
Claws Mail, but, as Auntie Mame said, 'Life is a banquet, and most poor
suckers are starving to death.' (That's the dialogue from the 1958
Rosalind Russell movie, mildly bowdlerised from the same line in the
stage play.)
The real problem, the _real_ problem, is that mailing lists are an
emergent feature of SMTP, not a planned one. Therefore, because the
commodity handling of mailing lists in commodity SMTP user software is,
well, a bit stupid, in the short term we're doomed to hear all of these
'But I'd rather it did things differently!' complaints. Guys? The
reason your software does things a bit stupidly is because -- most of
you -- are using software that does the bare minimum and isn't very good
at mailing lists.
You know where this problem got nailed, the first time out? Usenet.
NNTP newsgroups have _exactly_ the well-defined, consistently handled
concept of off-forum response ('reply') versus on-forum response
('follow-up') that its close cousin SMTP has never had.
Meanwhile, some MUAs are simply a lot better at this than others. And
_that_ is why annoying artifacts occur.
[1] MUA = Mail User Agent, meaning user-facing mail client program. Are
you tired of this footnote yet, Steve? ;-> At some point, this becomes
rather like Doctor Evil repeatedly explaining 'LASER' with air-gesturing
of the quotation marks.
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