RE: Why replies are often sent to sender - was Re: KDE freezing
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Johnson [mailto:baloo@ursine.dyndns.org]
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 02:47:56PM +0930, Barney Wrightson wrote:
> > It's probably because by default reply-to is to the sender and not
the
> > list, I rememeber a debate about this on the list a while ago, but I
> > can't remember why it was decided that this is a "Good Thing". I
would
>
> http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
The arguments in this link are fallacious. First, reply-all usually
includes both the original sender and the group address, resulting in
the default behavior of sending a reply to the original poster twice,
which is (quite properly) contradicted by this list's code of conduct.
Second, the author at once implores the list owners to educate their
users about this common mailer feature and then bemoans a case where he
personally sent private mail to one of his own lists. Perhaps it would
be better to educate users about simply not sending personal email to a
mailing list?
Those 'principles' are pure sophistry. He makes up fancy names for his
opinions and then claims, "Aha, look how this 'principle' is violated.
Shocking!"
I am on several mailing lists, most of which set the reply-to header to
the list itself. This is much more convenient than having to crop my own
headers every time I want to post something! I have not run into any
trouble. I can always reach the OP if I want.
If there are N users posting on average M messages to a mailing list
every week, and it takes 5 seconds to edit the headers, that is NxM/720
hours per week wasted. Even conservative values for N and M yield
disturbing results.
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