Quoting Steve Litt ([email protected]):

> And now for my netiquette nit, addressed to all list inhabitants...
> 
> Don't email me and copy the list. Don't email the list and copy me.

In fairness, some MUAs (such as mutt) make it easy to comply with this
request.  Many do not.  mutt makes it easy because of its special
functions for handling list-reply, in which it recognises that a mailing
list is among the recipients and strips the others.  People with
old-fashioned MUAs implementing reply-all without list-handling
heuristics cannot comply except through the respondent manually removing
offlist CCs.

Unfortunately, this situation persists because SMTP, unlike NNTP, never
was designed for smoothly handling one-to-many mechanisms such as
mailing lists.  NNTP newsgroups (and newsreader software packages) have
different heuristics for handling 'followups' (replies to the newsgroup) 
vs 'replies' (off-forums responses in SMTP mail).  Pure SMTP has nothing
quite like that.

Because I use mutt and benefit from its list-reply functionality, I am
able to give you what you desire in my replies to your mailing list
posts.  Many other people cannot except by fussy editing of headers
during composition, which, let's be honest, will seldom happen.
_However_, please note that my use of list-reply, even though it's what
_you_ like, annoys other folks who _prefer_ a separate direct copy.

Your best method of reliably getting you want, IMO, is to suppress
duplicates.  A standard method of doing so in procmail that's about as
old as the dinosaurs:

:0 Wh: msgid.lock
| formail -D 8192 msgid.cache


> And a single post to the list makes it MUCH easier for me to reply: I
> don't have to change my To: line.

If you used an MUA that supported proper list-reply, you wouldn't 
need to 'change your To: line', either.  (I haven't checked headers
to see if your MUA is revealed, there.  If you _do_ use mutt, switch
to doing list-reply.)


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