[Tutor] Replying

[Brett Ritter]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 1:04 PM,  <markrivet at gsoftcon.com> wrote:
> When replying to the mailing list, does everyone just hit the reply button in your email program. Because that sends the email directly to your email. Also everyone is cc'ng the mailing list; is that the exceptable way to reply so everyone in the list gets the replies?

Fully functional email clients (generally only found on Linux/BSD)
have a "reply to Group" function that works as intended.

Most email clients lack such ability, so the process on this list is
to use "Reply to All", which CC's the list as you describe.

How email lists function is an oft-debated topic.  Many (most?) lists
will make the "reply-to" header in the email reflect the list address
(instead of the original sender), so a simple "Reply" will go to the
list.  However, the "Reply To" header is not intended by the email RFC
to function this way.  It ends up in a battle of "follow the spec as
intended" vs "follow the generally expected results".  You can read
much on this debate by googling for "Reply To munging harmful" and
"Reply To munging useful", but further discussion is definitely
outside the scope of this list.

Technical mailing lists and/or long-existing mailing lists will often
take stances on subjects such as reply to, top-quoting, quote
trimming, signatures, plain text vs HTML, etc because many of those
standards came about from a time when communicating detailed and
in-depth topics over email to a large group was pretty much the only
way to communicate if not in person.  Today's web-forum lol
outlook-trained populace is generally ignorant of such reasonings, but
trust me, the rules have a reason beyond techie elitism for existing.
(*steps off soapbox*).  You can google "Eternal September" for more on
that general topic.

TL;DR Version: Yes, that's perfectly acceptable.  *bites tongue to
resist going off on a rant about TL;DR*

Hope that was helpful!
-- 
Brett Ritter / SwiftOne
swiftone at swiftone.org