Re: netiquette: CCing on lists
On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 02:03:05PM -0800, Mark Ferlatte wrote:
> Monique Y. Herman said on Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 11:34:25AM -0700:
> > I put a comment in my sig requesting that I not receive CCs, and I
> > swear that the number of CCs I received actually increased!
> >
> > What can I do that will convince habitual CCers not to CC me? Are
> > there technical means beyond the Mail-Followup-To header?
>
> Well, it depends. For example, I have a procmail rule that filters
> duplicate messages. If you send a message to the list and Cc: me, I
> will only get one message in my mailbox. Therefor, I don't care, at
> all, if you Cc: me or not. In fact, I was honestly confused by people
> saying that this was a problem (I've had the dups filter installed for
> years, long before I got into Debian).
>
> Most of the people who have this problem, I believe, have the
> technical ability to setup such a filter, and for reasons that I don't
> understand choose not to do so and instead depend upon the charity of
> the mailing list posters to cater to their reply whims. This, to me,
> seems silly, but as I said, there's obviously something there that I'm
> not understanding.
Here's my reason for disliking this approach. If a mail is sent to both
me and a mailing list, it's very likely that the one sent directly to me
will get there first, since it doesn't incur list processing delays, and
therefore the direct copy is the one that the filter will usually keep.
Thus, such a duplicates filter does precisely the wrong thing: I want
all the list traffic to end up in the list mailbox, not in my inbox!
Furthermore, it is occasionally useful to provide the facility for
somebody to cc me when they particularly need to draw my attention to
something on a high-traffic list, such as a discussion on debian-devel
that strays onto talking about a bug in one of my packages. A duplicates
filter breaks the semantics I want for my e-mail address, in that it
could no longer be relied upon (modulo spam filtering, etc.) to reach my
inbox.
I thought about this in some depth back when I started having a problem
with people ccing me on list replies, and decided that filtering
duplicates wasn't suitable for me.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: