On 04/08/12 06:32, Walter Prins wrote:
On 3 August 2012 19:35, Alan Gauld<[email protected]> wrote:
The list doesn't care, you probably did it by hitting Reply
instead of Reply All.
Reply replies to the person who posted. Reply All replies to all
on the list. Just like regular email.
That's just how its set up, to mimic normal email.
Well normally I expect emails from a list (being the direct sender),
to go back to the sender, e.g. the list, and emails directly from a
person to go back to that person. (Differently put, I expect *any*
email to by default go back to the sender, in general, unless I
specify otherwise. So if a mailing list sends me an email, my default
expectation is that the mail goes back to the list, unless I specify
otherwise. This seems perfectly intuitive to me, but hey ho what the
hey. :) )
The problem with that reasoning is that the list is *not* the sender. It's
just a rely that handles list management and delivery. If you reply to a paper
letter from Aunt Tilly, would you expect it to be delivered to the postman who
delivered it to you?
There is a long, acrimonious debate about the behaviour of mailing lists. Some
people, like you, want the mailing list to hack the "Reply To" address so that
replies go back to the list instead of the sender. The biggest argument in
favour of that is simplicity: you just hit "Reply" on any email and the reply
goes to the appropriate place: the list for list mail, and the actual sender
for private mail.
The biggest argument against is that it encourages a particular failure mode,
where the recipient goes to make a private reply, says something personal or
embarrassing, but forgets to change the address away from the public list.
(My personal answer to that is, carelessness is not the mailing list's fault.
If you are writing something private and can't be bothered checking who you
are sending too, that's your problem.)
Others consider that mangling the Reply To address is an abomination, and
insist that it is a horrible abuse of Internet standards, and that it's no big
deal to just hit Reply All. Which is wrong because it's a pain in the arse to
get two copies of every nearly every email. (Some mailing list software is
smart enough to not send you a second copy, but most isn't. Some mail clients
are smart enough to detect duplicate emails and throw one away, but most
don't, and even those that do only do so *after* the email has been downloaded
from the server.
Also, the problem with the "purity" behaviour is that it encourages n00bs and
the careless to take conversations off-list.
It's an imperfect world, and neither solution is right all the time. I have
gradually moved away from the "lists should change the Reply To address" camp
to a third camp, which is to insist on better tools. If your mail client
doesn't give you a simple "Reply To List" command, then your mail client is
crap. Some non-crap mail programs include Thunderbird, mutt, and Kmail. One
crap one is apparently Gmail.
See:
http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html
which I don't entirely agree with -- the author makes claims about what people
want, apparently without realising that the reason for the debate is that not
all people want the same thing. In my opinion, he panders too much to the
careless and stupid -- I have negative sympathy for anyone who sends private
mail to a public address because they didn't bother to glance at where it was
going before hitting Send. And he fails to consider the obvious answer that if
the Reply To address is for the sender to set to whatever they like, all a
mailing list need do is make "you agree that replies will go to the list" a
condition of joining a list, and then the mailing list software, acting as
your agent, is entitled to mangled the Reply To address.
And of course, we still have the problem of human laziness and stupidity. It
is *astonishing* how many people apparently have problems with the concept:
"Before you reply to an email, decide whether you want to reply to the sender
alone, the group, or the mailing list."
They'll insist on having a choice between 45 different coffees at Starbucks,
but can't cope with the choice between 3 different types of reply.
--
Steven
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