Re: more developer identity stuff
On Mon, 31 Aug 1998, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
: [ Please don't Cc: public replies to me. ]
:
: Nathan E Norman:
: > If this is the case, then reading the lists with Pine is indeed a PITA!
: > (I know there are other alternatives to Pine, but I'm used to it and so
: > far too lazy to change ...)
:
: I assume you mean that it is painful to reply to list messages with Pine.
: I think Pine makes it fairly easy to remove and move addresses (ctrl-k
: removes an address, ctrl-u inserts it again).
Well, if you want to call that "easy" :)
: For what it's worth, I don't think Reply-to should be set by the
: mailing list, because its definition was botched by RFC822 (it has too
: many meanings). Thus, too many mail user agents (or their authors) get
: confused, and operate in surprising ways when Reply-to is forced by the
: list. For example, every self-respecting mail user agent has separate
: "reply to author of message" and "reply to everyone" commands. If
: the mail has a Reply-to header, most mail user agents will obey that
: automatically. Thus, it is easy to send comments meant to be private to
: the list. One wishes that everyone would check their To and Cc headers
: before sending private comments, but that's not how people work,
: especially since it's necessary only on a few mailing lists.
I completely agree! Setting the reply-to is evil - I've been swayed by
all the arguments before.
I don't pretend to know the insides and outs of Pine, let alone any
other MUA. I wish wichever MUA I was using was smart enough to know
that the message I'm replying to came from a mailing list, and would
prompt me whether to reply to the list, the author, or both (like most
newsreaders do). Perhaps Pine does this, but as I hadn't considered it
a big deal until now, I didn't worry about it. Perhaps it's time to
move to mutt ... I don't know. There's always that little emacs program
that gets installed by default ...
: Without the Reply-to, most users need to edit the To/Cc headers manually
: to remove non-list respondents. I consider this to be a smaller evil than
: sending private message to lists by mistake.
Again, I agree. Let's not even discuss setting reply-to.
: The new headers will solve these problems, of course, but it will take
: time until they're in wide-enough use. (I don't use them myself, because
: my MH/exmh/procmail/other mail configuration has become complicated and
: fragile enough that I'm considering writing a new mailer from scratch
: rather than touch the config. This is not a joke.)
I'll look forward to your work!
Thanks,
--
Nathan Norman
MidcoNet 410 South Phillips Avenue Sioux Falls, SD
mailto:finn@midco.net http://www.midco.net
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