Gabriel Sechan wrote: > >From: "John H. Robinson, IV" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > >Munging *bad* > > > Munging good. 99.99999% of the time when I reply to a message list post, I > wish to reply to the list. Thats what reply does with munging. Make the > common case easy, while not making the uncommon cases impossible.
*VERY* common misconception. Most of the time, munging is a no-op, but let;'s look at the failure cases: You reply to a person on a list. Reply-To: shunts that over to the list, but you intended the person as the recipient. By not paying attention, and using muscle memory to hit -r- to Reply, you end up going to the list. On a non-munged list, you hit -r- to Reply to the list, but you fail to pay attention, and it goes to the individual. Failure mode for non-munged lists: public information is kept private. Failure mode for a munged list: private information is made public. Ask yourself this, how many times have you seen private information gone to a public list? I've seen it many times. There is also the irretrievably lost information associated with Reply-To's, but since the AOLisation of the internet (a generation I am a part of, thank you) the Reply-To has more-or-less faded into obscurity. This is a very minor corner case, granted. It is still there. Non munged lists do not suffer information loss, nor do they have catastrophic failure modes. Munging makes bad things easy, and makes uncommon things impossible. Explain how this is better, please. Make sure you address the ``bad things being easy'' as good and ``uncommon things impossible'' as being good. To counter that Reply-To makes common things easy, a good MUA (mutt!) will differentiate between a group reply, an individual reply, and a list reply. Some may argue that an aggregate is the same as a unit, but I contend that those cannot tell the difference between an apple and a crate that has apples in it. Once you have trained your muscles to use L for lists, you rarely make a mistake between replying to a person, or to a list. Private things are private, public things are public. This is a good thing. -john -- KPLUG-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
