On Wed, Nov 29, 2000, Moshe Zadka wrote about "Re: OT: To: & Cc:":
> I use sometimes pine, sometimes mutt and sometimes MH. In each case,
> I usually either reply to the person specifically, or reply to the
> list in general and the person -- unless I remember that this
> person does not like to receive mails twice. I'd do that even if I'm
> using vi+sendmail.
>
> Of course, the real problem is that you never know what you want to do,
> because you never know what the person on the other side likes you to do.
> Maybe I like to have replies go both to me and to the list. Maybe not.
> Maybe I'm subscribed. Maybe I'm not. There was a thread about it in
> Debian-Devel, and the agreed solution was that
>
> a) people should use their MUA to add a Mail-Followup-To: header.
> b) people who reply should configure their MUA to honour
> Mail-Followup-To:.
But this gets more complicated: when somebody posts to the list a reply to
your email, does he keep your address on the Mail-Followup-To, or not? Any
choice is problematic: if you take the original person off and he's not
subscribe he'll not see the replies to the replies, but if you leave him on
he might get dozens of replies in sub-threads he's no longer interested in,
and this might drag on for weeks (sometimes people "reply" even when they
simply intend to post a new message). The latter is what happening in
linux-il: sometimes you see when you press "g"roup reply that the email will
be going to half-a-dozen people, each of them contributed one message to
the thread you're replying too; The thread may have completely divereged
since but the originator of the thread will still be getting a personal
copy of every message on it.
In short I think that there's only one solution to this nasty problem: when
you write something to a list you must expect to visit the list to find the
replies. Plain and simple. You simply can't rely on people forwarding a copy
of every reply to you, or making decisions on what is a "reply" which should
be forwarded to you and what is not. And once you can't rely on that and are
forced to read the list anyway, getting a personal copy of each message
becomes a nuisance. At least in my opinion.
But let's face it - we'll never agree on what is the "proper" way to handle
replies to mailing-lists...
--
Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Nov 29 2000, 2 Kislev 5761
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |I used to be a lumberjack, but I just
http://nadav.harel.org.il |couldn't hack it, so they gave me the axe.
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