Paul Smith wrote:
Mailing lists aren't AI. True. But they do consist of a whole lot of people having a conversation. Reply-To the original poster is like whispering... it's rude. How often do we see "oops, sorry, sent it to the OP" on this list. That should be a measure of how counter intuitive this way is. On my "other" lists, I see about once a month a private e-mail sent to the list. Here I see e-mails quoted that haven't gone to the list much more often.%% Wulfy <wulfmann@tiscali.co.uk> writes: w> When I get a personal e-mail from someone, I expect the Reply-To w> button to reply to them. When I get an e-mail from a *list* I w> expect the Reply-To button to reply to the *list* as that is where w> the e-mail came from. No it didn't. Mailing lists aren't AI programs: they can't write email. The email came from another person. In fact, it came from the person in the Reply-To field (or the From field if there's no Reply-To).
Hmmm... I haven't replied to the one GNU list I'm on, and yes, when I tried it it does it the "right" way. The totally counter-intuitive way.w> Every other list I am a member of, including Yahoo Groups, w> SmartGroups and various academic lists do that. Funny. We must run in very different circles: every other list _I'm_ a member of, including all the GNU mailing lists, the other Debian lists, the SourceForge lists, Gnome lists, etc. etc... even the internal mailing lists at work, all work the RIGHT way; the same way Debian does: they don't molest Reply-To.
Strange. I pressed Reply-to-All on one of my obviously defective mailing list e-mails. What came up?Anyway, this argument is as common as it is fruitless. The Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful doc has all the reasons why people oppose Reply-To munging. To me the most critical one is that by removing Reply-To you're destroying information on how to send mail to the original poster... in fact these days you might have destroyed the only possible valid way to respond to the poster. Other people have other favorites.
To: <List> CC: <Original poster>Nothing was lost unless you consider using Reply-To-All and removing the list address and changing the CC: to To: as "not a *valid* way of replying to the OP". And it's not as if the mailing list software *just* forward the e-mail. It must change the headers because I doubt very much that *any* client would put the list-reply-to header in...
The question is: if I'm reading an e-mail from a list, am I more likely to want to reply to the list or the original sender? To me it's obvious - the list. So that should be the default setting for Reply-To. The less likely requirement should have the more steps to it.
-- Blessings Wulfmann Wulf Credo:Respect the elders. Teach the young. Co-operate with the pack. Play when you can. Hunt when you must. Rest in between.
Share your affections. Voice your opinion. Leave your Mark.