[Mailman-Users] Reply-to options not working

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jordan Brown writes:

 > You were complaining that in some list configurations you will tend to
 > get multiple copies of a message - one directly to you, and one via the
 > list.
 > 
 > I was suggesting that one way to address that complaint would be for
 > your mail client to detect the duplication and hide the duplicate
 > copies.

One convention that was used a lot on one of the dev lists I
participated in was that explicitly addressing a senior dev meant you
needed *their* attention and *soon*.  Suppressing either would be
suboptimal (they ended up getting saved in different folders for most
of us, and especially as listmaster, *I* wanted the list copies).
(BTW, people who reply-all'd to such messages ended up in a lot lof
killfiles, everybody happy!)

 > > I'm /not/ saying where your reply /does/ go.  I'm saying where I would
 > > /like/ it to go. 
 > 
 > Mostly, I'd say that you've already said that by including the mailing
 > list in the To or CC list.  When I reply to a message with multiple
 > recipients (however those recipients might be specified), I'd say that
 > the normal convention is to include all of them in any ongoing
 > discussion by hitting Reply All.

That's "normal" mostly because, like you, most people think that a few
seconds cleaning up a reply-all list is way too much effort.  But that
habit being widespread certainly means that some people with no
interest in the conversation end up in the canoe with you, merely
because they posted to a mailing list at some point.  Many of these
same people think that almost all replies to a list post should be
directed to the list.  That combination certainly accounts for some of
the strength of support for Reply-To munging.

 > If you wanted your message to go to the mailing list but didn't
 > want replies to go there, you could have put the mailing list into
 > the BCC.

These days, you mostly can't.  BCC'd mailing lists mostly assume
you're a spammer.


-- 
Associate Professor              Division of Policy and Planning Science
http://turnbull/sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/     Faculty of Systems and Information
Email: turnbull at sk.tsukuba.ac.jp                   University of Tsukuba
Tel: 029-853-5175                 Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN