On Wed, Feb 17, 1999 at 11:52:22PM -0000, Russell Nelson wrote:
> Tim Pierce writes:
> > Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of unreasonable mailers in the
> > world, which makes that philosophy impractical.
>
> Pandering to the unreasonable mailers doesn't help. The chief cost is
> one of embarrassment to the poor slob who forgot that he was replying
> to a mailing list. We've all seen it happen. I can't imagine that
> anybody thinks that's a good thing.
>
> How's about we get the unreasonable mailers fixed?
Sounds great! I'm all ears. Where do we submit bug reports for
Microsoft Internet Mail, Microsoft Outlook, and WebTV?
The sad reality is that mailers for the consumer world are getting
worse and not better, and we have little power to fix that. Mailers
that lack "group-reply" are only the tip of the iceberg; they also
lack any useful filtering or filing capability, they fail to identify
the message sender, they send replies to the wrong address, they send
replies with broken return addresses.
Managing a mailing list means making the decision about how to handle
people like this. If you're a toy site, you can probably get away
with telling all your users to lose the broken software. You can't
get away with telling 50,000 users to lose their broken software.
Pandering to these users doesn't necessarily help, but ignoring them
is no better a solution. Ultimately you have to find some way to cope
with their brain damage, until we figure out how to fix it.
Like I said, I'm all ears.
--
Regards,
Tim Pierce
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative
system obfuscator and hack-of-all-trades
