"David W. Jones" <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been on lists (using other mail clients where someone is screaming that > "REPLY SHOULD GO TO THE LIST!!!" while someone else is screaming "REPLY > SHOULD GO TO THE POSTER!!!" even while others are fighting over whether a > reply should go to both the list and the poster or to just one or the other. > And those aren't Yahoo Groups. And two different lists might have things set > up differently. > > Makes me think that there's no one universal "right" way.
Of course, there is! The message have to be marked being addressed (‘To’) to a person(s) it is in fact addressed, that is to person(s), that is called in the second person (‘you’). And copies (‘Cc’) are meant to be sent to anyone else your message might concern. Note that I did not say anything about a list. That’s because this rule is general — it applies to _any_ mail, and the fact, that one of that addresses is collective, changes nothing in this simple and standard pattern. Indeed, you might have no idea how machinery behind a given email address is organized. If someone believes, that list is always public, he’s honestly mistaken: their amount is neglectable¹, most lists are private. Consider an example: you wrote to <[email protected]> and got a reply from <[email protected]> carbon-copied to <[email protected]>. Will you drop Alice from your next reply? Returning to public lists, I would claim, that anyone who screams that “REPLY SHOULD GO TO THE LIST!” is a blatant egoist, that believes that his own preferences are universal and unshakeable. > So perhaps a setting somewhere so user could select their desired option? The truth is, that everyone have been always had options, and more than one. They are provided by their own mail splitting (sorting, filtering) facility, whether it be on remote server or on localhost. You’d like to treat replies to you and / or copies, made for you, specially — here you are. You don’t want them at all, preferring to receive a mail through an intermediary² — nothing can be simpler, just drop anything that was sent (among others) to the list, but came otherwise. But that only remains true, until the list is populated with aforementioned egoists. Then, those who prefer to have their mail to be addressed to them, is stripped of personal choice and have to abide to majority. > Asking for that to be something specific to an individual list would be tough > to implement, yes? Nope, it’s not per-list. It’s per-recipient, and no one besides him alone should care to know his preferences. He might change them ten times a day, if he will. There are techniques³, which, being offspring of Usenet, suppose to address the issue from the other side — by shifting the burden of fulfilling someone’s wishes from the only person interested in it onto everyone else. They, as you’ve already seen, are broken by design, however good useragents (K-9 is not one of them) do implement them. _ ¹ And if we are about to continue producing complexity, they eventually will totally extinct, ceding place to the tools, that are much less liberal, and therefore simply do no leave any space for questions. ² Which, as we were able to ascertain, might threat them badly. ³ Just another headers to support: ‘Mail-Followup-To’ and ‘Mail-Copies-To’. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "K-9 Mail" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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