Pete Phillips wrote: > 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.
Just out of curiosity, why would they not receive a reply? I mean, if they are on the list. > 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 my case, it's not a matter of being offended by personal communication. It's a matter of managability. The purpose digest gets circumvented by this. Anyone subscribing to the digest gets the same thing twice. And the volume of list email increases not just twice. Would a subscriber to the nondigest list get it twice, one from the respondent and another from the list? > 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. If you received the email from the list (whichever list), the recipients of that list should get responses to the list (otherwise there is a problem elsewhere that needs fixing). The respondent always has the option of responding to all lists, but that's not his/her obligation. > > 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. I looked at the message source code/text. It was probably a personal email. But I have received responses in the past on forum threads that seemed personal, but weren't. *That* is just poor manners. Especially on newsgroups, where a certain conduct is expected. Also, just plain poor communications etiquette in general, even if you're just copying a memo to a group of persons, and sending it to an individual as a personal memo. It is not a matter of being offended; this kind of communication can cause redundancy, confusion, and misunderstanding. If in fact that is not a problem with the list administration, then I erred in responding to the list as if it were. I have apologized for that. > > 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. To be frank, I don't work in the area of processing email, so I'm not sure what Reply-All does in all circumstances. In my normal circumstances, it replies to the sender (which should be the forum rather than the true poster) as well as all cc'd people. In my simple view of the world, the email from the list wouldn't have anything in the cc field because all intended recipients are already on the list. So Reply-All would act the same as Reply, which in my opinion should be the list. If there is a Reply-To to avoid any ambiguity, it should also be the list. If things turn out to be not so simple, for whatever reason, and the respondent uses Reply-All, then there are uncertainties as to whether everyone on the autogenerated recipient list should (or wants to) get the email. For that reason my personal preference is that any nonforum addresses be removed from the recipient list in that case. Any that are not clear should be removed. As a member of a specific list, you only have to respond to the list that sent it to you; you are not obliged to figure out the world at large and send it to all lists that received the original post. That way, digest subscribers still get a digest. In fact, it would seem better to hit Reply only, then just add any/remove recipients that you felt were needed. Presumably, the Reply button generates a potentially smaller recipient list, and would not reply to anyone that wouldn't be a recipient of Reply-All. Reduces the likelihood of sending to extraneous destinations. > 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] If it is the list administration that is automatically including the poster on the Reply-To field, I prefer otherwise. Not all respondents will remove the personal email address. The respondent may not even be able to tell that the sender didn't put himself or herself there intentionally. If it isn't the list administration doing that, then....well, I guess, then nothing. In short. So in summary, I prefer that responses go only to the list. If only to avoid cirumventing the digest. The respondent can always add individuals to the recipient list if necessary, but to have that by default generates extra email. People often do not trim the recipient list to email only the list. Respondents to the respondents don't end up fragmenting the thread if everything goes the list (many respondents may just hit reply without explicly copying the list). Those are my opinions in the absence of these email loops from the vacation programs. These loops are a different matter, and change the story. I said in prior a post that these loops are far less preferrable to the extra email generated by automatically having more than just the mailing list in the recipient list. Fred -- Fred Ma, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Carleton University, Dept. of Electronics 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario Canada, K1S 5B6 _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
