On 2012-11-20, John Long <codeb...@inbox.lv> wrote: > > The tools are fine.... Outlook, AOL, google groups, it's pretty much > all about thumbing your nose at the world and saying you don't give > a rat's a$$ about the other guy.
Outlook actually illustrates my point. Good tools interpret the mail-followup-to header, and also have a reply-to-list feature. Outlook does not, on both counts. So mailing lists have established conventions whereby everyone is expected to reply-all. This means those with a more sophisticated tool chain (mutt+procmail+fetchmail+postfix) must receive multiple copies of post replies. Their well-configured procmail sends the list reply to the list inbox because it filters on x-been-there, not the subject line. But the duplicate clutters their personal inbox. So everyone is forced to cater for conventions designed to help those with lousy tools, and the resulting disaster annoys those who have carefully chosen quality tools. And it's not just low-tech mailing lists that do this. The gnucash mailing list is run by someone from MIT, so you expect them to do something intelligent. But no, they have adopted the reply-all convention. Same with line-wrapping. Because a readers tool is lousy at line wrapping does not make a case for imposing line wrapping on authors who use quality tools. > Just follow the other sheeple and say "everybody does it." Proper etiquette is established by those in a region, or in a group.. it's based on where you are. If you enter a village where everyone does something, that *is* the etiquette, by definition. To go against it is to lack etiquette. For some mailing lists, top-posting (as atrocious as it is), is the proper etiquette.
