On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:15:26 -0500 (CDT), Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote: > 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.
Indeed, this is the common issue, and unfortunately many mailers do not "reply-to-list" by default, even though they certainly should for messages with list headers. Mailers tend to eschew more email conventions and standards every year, so it seems to be a losing battle and I won't argue against your view that reliability in the common cases is more important than compliance with the RFCs. > 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] Fine, though the reply still won't go to the author's intended "Reply-To" because the list has overwritten this value, the best a recipient can possibly do is to reply to the "From" field (which admittedly, will usually work, even if it's not what the sender explicitly asked for). > 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. Indeed. Jed
