I prefer the 'reply to sender' default rather than 'reply to all'. As the list membership grows, the latter doesn't scale as well. At some point in their growth, most lists and newsgroups hit this barrier, and I think we're seeing that now in sqlite-users, where several people will offer the same answer, or make similar followup comments or even just send 'Thanks, that worked' to everyone. (Sun-managers adopted a great convention a long time ago, asking people to only reply to sender, but that senders were asked to summarize the answers back to the list, so that there was a useful price for asking questions that was paid back to the entire list)
I'd tend to disagree...
It really depends what you see the purpose of the list being.
If replies only go back to the original message sender, then there are quite a few disadvantages:
- there is no archive of the replies for future users to see, so the question will be asked over and over again (even more so than normal)
- there will be no 'peer review' of answers, so answers may be total rubbish, and no one will see it to say 'that's wrong'
- group discussions can't take place - just lots of single responses
If you have replies going to the original message sender only, then, really, you should just have a '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' email address, with no mailing list...
I understand what the mailing list docs mean about autoresponders etc - I'd solve that by having a moderated list with messages going to the whole list, there are other ways of solving it as well for most cases (ie delivery failure reports etc)
(Remember the Yahoo groups default was 'reply to list'. I don't recall anyone complaining about that particular behaviour :-) )
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