On 10/17/25 4:27 PM, D. Ben Knoble wrote: > Hi Michael, > > Thanks for helpful reply. Unfortunately, as I receive only the user digest > mail > and you did not include me in the To or Cc lists, I didn't receive this mail > in > my inbox, so I did not notice it until much later when checking one of the > mirrors. > > Is it considered "wrong" to Reply-All around here? On other lists of this > style > I use, we encourage Reply-All to keep folks who participate in the > conversation > receiving email. I want to learn the norms of this community, though.
My email client supports "Reply", "Reply all", and "Reply to list", and for emails coming to me via a mailing list, the third is the default action. I had to go out of my way to Cc you here. For users subscribed to all emails (not just digests), being in Cc is technically redundant, and depending if the list software lacks support for "do not send me a copy of emails I am in Cc for" (GNU Mailman has this feature, I have not seen it elsewhere!) it may result in *subscribed* users getting duplicate mail. For users *not* subscribed to all emails, Cc is of course necessary or else nobody will see messages intended for them. So really in my experience it tends to be that "Reply all" is culturally a personal habit localized to each list, based on whether any given list tends to have "most users" subscribe to all emails. For example, [email protected] is high volume and *very common* for users to only be interested in a subset of topics, so the culture arose to Cc all interested users. I think ideally lists would support the cool GNU Mailman feature I mentioned, and everyone would then happily use "Reply all" and get the best of both worlds... (I already get lots of duplicate emails whenever my personal address and a Gentoo team alias I am on the forward list for such as [email protected] are both in Cc. I've learned to shrug and move on when I get dupes.) -- Eli Schwartz
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