On Wed, 27 Jun 2012, David Bremner <david at tethera.net> wrote: > My bias is probably apparent in that I pushed the original patch...
And mine in that the first thing I did in my .emacs, back in 2009 or so, was write a reply-to-sender function, and reverse the behavior. In fact, I just got around to using the built-in behavior in the last couple of weeks or so. > I think the there is potential for unfortunate mistakes with either set > of bindings. On the one hand sending replies to unintended people can be > very embarrassing. Or something close to career-threatening. If you are in an office situation with non-technical folks, which I am, and which more and more of our users will likely be, replying-all accidentally can be quite dire. The deans and the chair of my department frequently send out requests for votes or comments to the whole department or faculty. In many cases, the information requested is ridiculously confidential for the medium; an accidental reply-all would be -- and I'm not overstating -- disastrous. Incidences of this are rare, because it's not the default in most standard clients. Even those coming from mutt or gnus are likely to be surprised. If it's not obvious, I'm pretty strongly against Carl's roll-back. I could, of course, just uncomment my old correction in my .emacs, but I think it's a change that could hurt users. Those who are more likely to prefer the reply-all behavior are more likely to be able to change the defaults. Those who aren't likely to change the defaults are more likely to be bitten, badly, by a default reply-all behavior. > On the other hand, forgetting to reply to the group can also be > problematic. True that. My solution to this has been to write what I call a "smart-reply" function -- it replies-all when you want it to, and replies-to-sender the rest of the time. It's pretty simple, and I sent it into the list before[0], but the basic functionality is that I give it a list of to: addresses that I will want to reply-all to by default (essentially, my mailing lists), and those will, by default, reply all. Others will by default be reply-to-sender. I realize this complicates the setup a bit, but it makes everyday use quite easy. Best, Jesse [0] id:"87hay8xdoe.fsf at jhu.edu"