Sure 'reply-to:list' is not perfect. But I'd rather keep this than deal with folks doing 'reply' - and sending e-mails to individuals instead of doing 'reply-all - to list'.
Sure the 'reply-to-harmful' folks say: the user has the choice between 'reply' and 'reply-all' and 'reply-to:list' removes this choice [hence harmful]. But I don't buy this argument. I think the default choice should be the most-commmon used item. And for lists 'reply-all or reply-to:list' should be this most-commmon use choice. But currently - this deault is in the user's mail-clinet setting. Even if a very few users default to 'reply' instead of reply-all' there will be enough indvidual messages to annoy us. In my alternative scheme - 'reply-to:list' is the default [so it takes care of the major usage]. In the minor usage where folks need to *explicitly* replies to individuals - instead of the list - then folks should do *extra work* and use 'forward' [instead of reply/reply-all] In the case of 'David Sheehan' - he went back to replying to an old petsc-dev email even though there were 30 new petsc-maint e-mails on the thread. And based on the latest e-mail - he is not aware that he is resending messages to petsc-dev and not to petsc-maint. In such cases when the user doesn't know where he is sending e-mails, not having 'reply-to:list' doesn't help anyway. Satish On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Jed Brown wrote: > This of course is the reason that David Sheehan keeps replying to > petsc-dev, despite numerous requests to move it to petsc-maint. > > The literature on why this is bad is plentiful. > > http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html > > http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html > > I know many mailers are broken and don't have proper "reply-to-list" > functionality. I know this isn't the first time this has come up, and I > understand that turning off the munging might cause more problems than > it fixes, but I'd just like to point out the situation. > > Jed >
