John H. Robinson, IV said:
> 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:
Don't care about the failure case. It's about user expectations. The
majority of users expect to reply to the list, so munging is good.
Everything else below is just so much propoganda.
> 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.
It's the user's fault, not the list. Don't blame the software for what
the user fails to do.
> 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.
This has nothing to do with the "AOLisation" of the internet, and
everything about crotchity admins not wanting to change to users
expectations.
> Non munged lists do not suffer information loss, nor do they have
> catastrophic failure modes.
Sending mail to the list intended for a member is not "catastrophic
failure".
> 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.
You perception of uncommon is way off base. I'm on about 25 mailing
list, the majority munge headers.
> 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.
Unfortunately for you, the majority of users use some version of
Outlook, so mutt is irrelevant to the majority case.
> 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.
>
No such key combination in Outlook. :-)
--
Neil Schneider pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net
http://www.paccomp.com
Key fingerprint = 67F0 E493 FCC0 0A8C 769B 8209 32D7 1DB1 8460 C47D
"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
-- Dr. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735)
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