On Sat, 2014-11-08 at 14:10 +0000, Jim Lesurf wrote: > On 08 Nov, Owen Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > Blasted mailing list, I sent the message below as a personal reply, > > AGAIN. I simply cannot get my brain to accept how this list works. I'm > > on half a dozen other mailing lists all of which work the other way > > round ie. replies go to the list. Mutter. > > I've also been a bit puzzled/confused by the list. I'd expected emails to > the list to just generate responses via the list. But various responses > have come both direct and via the list. > > I don't mind cc'ing back when I get direct responses in parallel. But it > does mean I am getting duplicatics and will have to set up a filter to > ensure these all go to the correct storage 'box' here. > > Is this all the norm here, or have I done something wrong? If the latter, > my apologies. Not experienced it on other lists where all by default goes > only via the list.
As Owen says, this has been discussed before. Your email client — every email client — has (at least) two options for *how* to reply to an email. First there's the private reply which goes only to the sender of the original email. And then there's the public "reply to all" which goes to everyone who received the original email. It is a heinous crime for someone to hack into your computer and hack your email software so that when you choose a *private* reply, you are actually tricked into replying in public instead. Sending a message which was intended to be private, to a *public* forum, can be catastrophic. It can ends friendships, jobs, marriages. Granted, that doesn't happen often. But it *does* happen. Conversely, if someone isn't thinking and accidentally presses the private 'reply' button when they meant to reply in public, that failure mode is harmless. They get to feel a bit of a muppet because they couldn't drive their email program properly, and they can resend the mail to the right place. But then again, the *email* they sent when they weren't thinking straight might sometimes need editing once they sober up anyway. Or might be better of just not sent :) When a mailing list abuses the Reply-To: header to redirect *private* replies back to the list, that's horrible. I know some people do it in the interest of "simplicity", because users are often too clueless to press the right button. But for $DEITY's sake this is *simple*. It's hardly difficult to know the difference between the private and public reply buttons, and *all* email clients have them. By abusing the Reply-To: header in this way, those lists are actually *creating* the confusion that they claim to be trying to work around. Now, if you *do* want to reply in public, there's a separate question about whether you should reply *only* to the list, or whether you should reply to all and keep everyone in the loop. Again it's useful to look at the failure modes. If you reply to everyone, then those who have actively participated in the thread will be copied directly. Many may want this, but a *few* people will be trivially inconvenienced by having two copies of the same email. An inconvenience which does them no real harm. Now think about what happens if you *don't* do people the courtesy of copying them directly. Some people will be cut out of the conversation *entirely*, and others will just be receiving it in a delayed form so that by the time they're able to reply, the conversation has moved on. See http://david.woodhou.se/reply-to-list.html for a detailed treatment of this, including a bunch of specific cases where the *lack* of a direct copy causes problems for individuals or even the entire set of subscribers to other mailing lists on which the thread may have been cross-posted. Seriously, there isn't much of a debate to be had here. Use the right button in the mailer. And if you *insist* on replying to the list instead of to everyone, your mailer *probably* has an option for that too. But be prepared that a number of more technical people will just *ignore* you if you do that. Seriously, when I start to help someone because I happen to come across their email in one of the dozens of mailing lists to which I'm subscribed, and they *fail* to reply to me directly, I'm very unlikely to see their response. And if I *do* happen to see it and they haven't done me the courtesy of replying directly to me, I'll be very disinclined to continue helping them. Life's too short to help people who make life hard for themselves and me. -- dwmw2
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