On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Jed Brown wrote: > Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes: > > > On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Jozsef Bakosi wrote: > > > >> Can you guys please CC jbakosi at lanl.gov? Thanks, J > > > > Mailing lists are setup that way. The default is: subscribe to > > participate, and reply-to: list. So cc:ing automatically doesn't work. > > If everyone used mailers that did group replies correctly, then we would > always preserve Cc's in list discussions and the list would not munge > the Reply-to header. Then people could subscribe and turn off list > mail, or they could filter all mail to the list that didn't directly Cc > them. This is a great way to manage high-volume mailing lists. You can > even allow anonymous posting to the mailing list, which is what the Git > list and many other open source/technical lists do. > > This is ruined by munging Reply-to because many/most mailers drop the > From address in a group-reply when Reply-to is set. > > http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html > > http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html > > The problem is that an awful lot of mailers/users don't automatically do > group replies to mailing list messages, causing the list Cc to be > dropped. We have this problem with petsc-maint in that several emails > per day are reminding people to keep petsc-maint Cc'd in the reply. > > Personally, I would rather turn off Reply-to munging and use a canned > reply instructing users to resend their email to the list with all Cc's > included (i.e., use "reply-all" when replying to the list). Almost all > mailers can be configured to make this the default. > > I think this change would cause more people to ask questions on the > mailing list where it becomes searchable than on petsc-maint where the > reply helps only one person. > > > Satish argued the other way when we discussed this a few years ago: > > http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/2010-March/002489.html
Yes - and I still stand by that argument. Its best to otimize for 'majority usage' pattern. I know you deal with personal replies for petsc-maint stuff. But I set up my mailer to automatically set Reply-to:petsc-maint for all petsc-maint traffic [and modify it manually for the 1% usage case where thats not appropriate] And wrt anonymous posts [without subscribing] - that was a receipie for spam. [however good the spam filters are] - so you'll have to account for that crap aswell. We get plenty of that on petsc-maint - but now with petsc-users mailing list - that spam gets distributed to all list subscribers. Satish
