And now, some mailing list etiquette. Question: Should I mail a copy of my response to the list, and to the person who wrote the message?
There are two opinions on this, and as far as I'm concerned they're both wrong. Opinion A: some people subscribe to mailing lists in "digest form" for reasons such as only being interrupted by a high-volume list once a day. Some mailing lists allow non-members to post to the list (moderated or otherwise). In both cases, leaving the original poster's address in the TO or CC field when you reply is "A Good Thing™" because the digest subscriber gets their answer faster without having to wait for tomorrow's digest, and the non-subscribed poster gets an answer (at all). Opinion B: Some people subscribe to digest view in order to reduce the volume of email they have to deal with. For these people, replying to them as well as the list is A Bad Thing™. For other people who are list subscribers, they end up getting duplicates of email, which they too consider to be A Bad Thing™. Both opinions are wrong, but they are the best we can come up with until mail clients support a means for a message poster to request "reply to list only please". Replying to All without chopping off list subscriber addresses is easily handled at my end by filtering duplicate messages. This can be done by my mail server acting as an MTA (ie: keep track of Message-IDs received and don't hand duplicate messages to the MDA), or my mail server acting as an MDA (ie: don't deliver duplicate messages), or my IMAP server (ie: don't write duplicate messages to the store), or by my mail client (eg: rule to filter duplicate messages). Complaining at length ON THE LIST about people who reply to all without chopping off subscribers is not easily handled at my end. This is the greater of the two evils, since it really does waste my time. In the worst instance, where my mail server or client do not de-duplicate, "Replying to All" is only just as bad as "Complaining at length ON THE LIST about people Replying to All". I find it easier to cope with deleting a second (or third, or fourth) copy of something I've just read, than having to delete messages which are terribly off-topic (and usually emotionally charged with UPPERCASE SHOUTING to add emotive impact). The former is a mechanical task, the latter involves switching mental context. So please, can we all just agree to disagree? Here are some positive actions you can pursue: - Send a feature request to your mail client publisher to have de-duplication based on Message-ID built in, - ask your ISP to de-duplicate incoming mail, - simply skip over multiple messages received from one person within a few minutes, or - resign yourself to deleting duplicate messages, as has been done since the dawn of time* I'm not a list moderator — but if I was, by golly some of you folks would get a stern talking to :P Alex * Dawn of time being 0 in the Unix epoch, of course. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
