Recently there seem to have been several new people contributing answers
to questions posed in this e-mail list. This is really good news.
However, many of the replies, while being accurate and extremely useful,
are not being seen by the questioner. This is almost certainly because,
as new "support staff", they are unaware of the way this list works.
The catch is that it is not necessary to subscribe to this list to send
a question to it (please let's not argue the rights and wrongs of this
again).
This means that if you reply to a question from an unsubscribed user and
if you don't explicitly send the reply to: or cc: that user's e-mail
address then that user will not see your reply.
The *only* way to tell if a question comes from an unsubscribed user is
to examine the mail headers. There will always be at least one
"Delivered-To: " header. If there is such a header saying "Delivered-To:
moderator for [email protected]" then the user is *not* subscribed
(messages from unsubscribed users go via the moderator). If you want
your reply to be seen by the unsubscribed user then you must include the
user's e-mail address in the to: or cc: list of the reply.
Some mail programs - Thunderbird is a notable example - let you filter
on the content of the "Delivered-To:" headers. My filter simply causes
all such messages to be highlighted, in my Inbox, in red so that I can
easily see which ones need this special attention. Other programs, like
Outlook Express, let you view the headers but not to filter on them.
Less convenient but still possible. Other programs may not even let you
view the headers in which case I'd recommend switching ...
Please, if you are going to answer newbie questions, don't waste your
own time shouting into a gale. It also sort of acts as a disservice to
the user, and belittles our reputation and that of openoffice.org,
because many/most of us, seeing that a question has *apparently* been
replied to, will not bother to send our own reply. In such cases the
newbie's question never gets answered even though it looks,
superficially, as if it has been.
--
Harold Fuchs
London, England
Please reply *only* to [email protected]
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