On 2 Feb 2003 at 13:50, Shing-Fat Fred Ma wrote: > I'm finding that I sometimes receive email on a thread > that is also posted to a mailing list or newsgroup. > [...] So if you just email to the list, everyone will see > it, including the person you want to email. [...] This is > the etiquette in newsgroups, but it's not as visibly > conveyed in all mailing lists. [...] There is another > reason why this is the etiquette in newgroups. > Participants may engage in discussions as they see fit, > and opt out (temporarily or otherwise, for whatever > reason) as they wish.
The etiquette depends on who is asked. I usually send both to the original sender and to the forum I am reading. I have often gone to some degree of effort to answer a poster's question only to discover he/she re-posting the same question later because they didn't receive the reply. This is incredibly annoying, so unless I'm certain of their method of participation, I will copy them personally. There are mailing-lists, newsgroups, echo-lists, sub-lists, EMail to Usenet gateways, Usenet to EMail gateways, Web Forum to EMail gateways, EMail to Web Forum gateways, some accept public submission, some don't, some echo to a parent-list, some echo to a child-list, some don't echo. Sometimes it's not apparent from the headers what forum a person is using to post a message. Sometime the reader won't have the experience to interpret the headers when it is obvious. And sometimes, the original questioner is just too clueless or lazy to filter through the forum in which they are posting! If in doubt, copy the original sender. If they are offended by receiving a direct EMail response (that's happened to me a total of once in 20+ years) then they're probably a troll in search of a flame, and the mistake was mine for bothering to try and help such a person. That's my etiquette. In the case of your own message, I have had to copy you personally to be sure that you receive this. I am posting to the VNC list, but the headers on your message indicate that it was posted to a tight-vnc list also. Are you a subscriber to the VNC list? Are you a subscriber to the Tight VNC list? Both? Is one an echo of the other? Is one a sub-list? The questions are rhetorical. The point is I don't know that you'll receive a copy from the VNC list. > The problem is that there is no information on the > headers that the email is also posted to the forum. There should be. This is probably a factor of your particular EMail client not displaying the headers you desire. > So my reply is not copied to the forum. The thread is > broken, and that defeats the purpose of the forum. > > Because this is happening alot lately I think it might be > the default behaviour of certain mailing programs (maybe > the only behaviour?). The default behavior of many free EMail clients. Outlook Express comes to mind, with its "Reply" and "Reply-All" buttons. I would suggest using "Reply- All" on such programs, then looking at the To: line it generates and deleting addresses that are not appropriate for the occasion. Other EMail clients will offer a more user-friendly approach, such as displaying a list of reply-address that you can check off. With regard to the Reply-to header... This header commonly generates a lot of passionate opinions from mailing-list users. Some people insist it should always be present, others that it never should. Unfortunately, it's not that simple, so neither opinion is always correct. I run a service that provides a number of mailing lists both public and private. Some are echoed by others (for example, to provide a moderated version), and some have been gatewayed to Usenet by others. Prohibiting this would be difficult to police if I wanted to, because any subscriber can do it. So, on my mailing lists, I insert a Reply-to header if one is not present. This discourages others from "hijacking" my MTA and effectively "splitting" my subscriber base, even accidentally. Replies to their moderated-list or newsgroup should still bounce to my list -- they have to intentionally violate RFC by altering the header for it to be otherwise. I also feel as you do that the lists are there to provide help to as broad an audience as possible, and the Reply-to discourages one-to-one replies. An important exception though, is that if the Reply-to header is already present when a message arrives at my MTA, I do not alter it. The RFCs strongly discourage it, but more important are the reasons why. Doing so will in some circumstances make it impossible to route return-mail back to the proper person, and/or route the message to the wrong person, and/or cause the accidental disclosure of private mail. I might also "hijack" someone else's MTA and split their subscriber base in cases where one of my users is echoing someone else's list. The entire debate is, IMO, misplaced. The header exists to facilitate the delivery of mail through certain types of gateways, not to overcome the limitations of a given EMail client. If the reply capabilities of a given EMail client are limited, common sense would dictate re-writing the client, rather than expecting every MTA in the universe to make accomodations for its limits. -- Pete Phillips -- San Antonio, Texas -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
