On 2/5/2018 12:29 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > The question I asked, which you misinterpreted completely IMO, and > Grant partially agreed with is "Does an algorithm which 1. gives > overriding precedence to Reply-To, 2. otherwise if List-Post is > present directs it there, and 3. finally falls back to From, seem > likely to DTRT most of the time?" You don't mention what your "smart reply" does with To and CC addresses. Discards them, I assume?
I suppose it depends on what "most of the time" means, and how often cross-posting happens, and how often messages to mailing lists include non-members. Indeed, most of the time I want to continue the conversation in the same fora that it's happening in. But: in my work contexts, it is quite common for somebody to address a question to a different team, a team that they are not a member of. A "reply" that goes to the List-Post address (versus All) won't do the right thing, because it won't include the original author. Normal "Reply All" does the right thing. But: in my work contexts, it is quite common for a discussion to span two teams. Again, a "reply" that goes to the List-Post address (versus All) won't do the right thing. Normal "Reply All" does the right thing. But: It's quite common for a discussion to be between an ad-hoc group of people on the To/CC lines. A "reply" that doesn't include To and CC doesn't do the right thing. Normal "Reply All" does the right thing. But: Even in a mailing list context, I think that "To: <author> CC: <list>" conveys useful context; I'm replying to what *you* said, and including everybody else in the audience. Reply All does the right thing. (Yes, it's suboptimal in that the To/CC list tends to accumulate people over time, but the MUA can't get that right because it doesn't know who is on the mailing list, ref points above.) And, finally, it isn't uncommon (probably 5% < x < 20%) for me to want to reply privately, perhaps to criticize, perhaps to try to resolve a private disagreement, or perhaps simply to pursue a side thread that isn't of general interest. Again, a "reply" that goes to List-Post (versus From) won't do the right thing and may lead to significant embarrassment, a risk that in my experience outweighs any possible advantage. I do *not* want my "Er, did you really mean to say <stupid mistake>" note to go to the entire audience. Normal "Reply" does the right thing (assuming non-munged Reply-To). So, net, there are many cases where "smart reply" doesn't do what I think is the right thing, and none where I think it's appreciably better than Reply or Reply All, as appropriate. (If you're interested, I'll see if I can do an analysis of my message traffic to see how often it would do something that I would consider to be clearly wrong and how often it would be an improvement.) On what might be a side note, I think there might be a key difference in attitude between different camps. One side wants to keep discussion on the mailing list when possible; another wants to keep discussion *off* the mailing list if it isn't of more or less general interest. There is nothing quite so annoying, for instance, as a "me too" flood. 95% of my e-mail is work, so every message costs the company money, times the number of people who have to pay at least enough attention to it to delete it. Ten seconds to scan a message, times a thousand people at $50 to $100 or more per hour, is $140 to $280 or more per message. > > So for the general case where you might have gotten a message > > directly, and through list A, and through list B, the result is > > random unless you pay careful attention to how you got this > > particular copy of the message. > > Yes and no (I partly disagree with Mark here). It's definitely > deterministic, and *not* random, but to users it may seem arbitrary. It is of course completely deterministic. But note that I said "unless you pay careful attention to how you got this particular copy of the message". > > I wouldn't use your "smart reply" button, because I think it does the > > wrong thing for mailing lists, > > I don't understand why you think that. So far you have consistently > responded to this thread on-list AFAICS, and everybody in this thread > got here by reading it on the mailing list (all first responded to a > mailing list post, not to one where they were personally addressed). You don't know about the private conversations :-) I did have a side conversation with Grant about exactly how I manage my e-mail addresses (distinct "From" addresses for each mailing list and each business I deal with). There were a couple of side comments to Mark. You also suppose that this style of mailing list dominates my mailing list usage... it doesn't. It's easily beaten by my Boy Scout e-mail, which often goes to both the "parents" and the "Scouts" lists, and at the moment (for stupid hosting reasons and because of a mailing list manager with ... suboptimal ... header handling) it's usually going to two copies of each list. And *that's* totally dominated by work e-mail. One might say that different behaviors are appropriate for different fora, and that wouldn't be totally wrong, but remembering that different fora will behave differently requires effort, and since Reply/Reply-All do the right thing in *every* fora, why would I want to spend that effort (and take the risk of mixing it up)? > > My only fear is that in the ongoing simplification (dumbing-down?) > > of this stuff, "smart reply" will become the only option. And, > > actually, if that happens then I *have* lost the "reply to author" > > function. > > I don't think that level of paranoia is justified. Sure, some dev > organizations will make that kind of mistake, as we've seen with > Thunderbird. But all of the MUAs I know that do have specialized > reply-to-list (mutt, Gnus) have very flexible interfaces for binding > UI gestures to functions, and far more available functions than > "one-click" or "one-key" gestures. If yours doesn't, then yes, you're > at risk that a whim of the developers you could lose essential > functionality. But that's a problem with your MUA and its dev team, > not with the suggested new functionality. I do 99%+ of my e-mail with T-bird on a Windows system, but there's still that <1% that's done with the Mail app on my iPad, which is the opposite end of the flexibility spectrum. That's the end that concerns me. And even T-bird is not immune to the "remove features to simplify things" disease. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
