On 2025-10-19, Eli Schwartz wrote: > On 10/17/25 4:27 PM, D. Ben Knoble wrote: >> >> 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.
It can also still mean users will get messages they don't necessarily want, I think I'm subscribed with nomail here (it's either that or I am just not subscribed, it depends on what the mailing list software requires, if not here it is at least the case in some other lists I post to), because I'll read everything through netnews. (A notable headache case, btw, is Google Groups-managed mailing lists, where you can subscribe in a "nomail" way... only if you have a Google account, otherwise you can't set subscription options (unless that has changed recently). Great design there...) > 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. Yeah, that matches my expectation as well: it will depend on the list and the habits used there. > 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.) The key problem with features such as that Mailman one is that it is a trade-off between getting messages with proper headers and not getting duplicates. But no, I don't know of anything better other that additional filtering/sorting rules to handle such duplicates. (I'd love a Mailman feature for "don't send me the Cc copy if I'm subscribed to the list", but of course that's not something Mailman can do :-) ) -- Nuno Silva
