Re: CC's of mailing list mail

[Tyson Richard DOWD <trd@cs.mu.oz.au>]

Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Tyson Richard DOWD <trd@cs.mu.oz.au> writes:
> > I would vastly prefer having the Reply-To set correctly. I was amazed
> > when I read the policy because I knew these lists didn't set their
> > Reply-To, which seemed to be a very simply way of helping enforce
> > the policy.
> > 
> > (And just to push the point home, this is the second time I've sent
> > this mail because I forgot to "group-reply" the first time. Murphy's Law
> > no doubt).
> 
> The reply-to *IS* set correctly (i.e., it's not set).  Please see
> http://www.unicom.com/FAQ/reply-to-harmful.html for more details.

I just did. The arguments don't really apply to this case, in fact,
some of them are misguided:
	- He argues that you can just do a "group-reply". This has
	  the unwanted (that is, it's against our policies) effect that
	  it sends CCs to all sorts of people. Most of the article
	  argues along these lines.
	- He argues that the feature people want most in elm is
	  "reply to the person, ignore the Reply-To", and claims
	  this is evidence of people not liking Reply-To: set. It could
	  equally be taken as evidence that people like Reply-To: set
	  in general, but would like to occasionally override it and
	  reply to the individual person. In themselves, the feature
	  requests are neutral.
	- The arguments of least harm are reasonable, but doing
	  a "group-reply" is also potentially dangerous. Imagine
	  cross-posts between debian-devel, debian-user and
	  debian-private. You read it in debian-private and then
	  group reply, not realizing it's a cross-post, accidently
	  revealing some sensitive information in your reply.

If it wasn't against our policies for CCs, it wouldn't be a problem.

I usually advocate the use of Reply-To:, particularly in technical mailing
lists, because chatter not meant for the list can be easily skipped,
whereas technical discussions that never made it on to the list are
easily lost.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            # Estne volumen in toga, an solum tibi libet
     trd@cs.mu.oz.au        # me videre? 
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #


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