Re: call for a vote -- should debian-user mailing list replies go to author or to list?
On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 06:17:36AM +0100, Wulfy wrote:
} Paul Smith wrote:
[...]
} >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.
} >
} Strange. I pressed Reply-to-All on one of my obviously defective
} mailing list e-mails. What came up?
}
} To: <List>
} CC: <Original poster>
Actually, that is almost certainly <poster's apparent originating email>
rather than <email to which the poster wants personal replies sent>. There
are real reasons why this is a problem. See below.
} 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...
Consider someone who uses an email reflector (e.g. an alumni address at
his/her alma mater) as a permanent address. That email currently reflects
to an address at his/her ISP. Said ISP insists that all outgoing email
appear to come from the SMTP-authenticated address used to send it for
spam-fighting purposes, so the from field can't be changed to the reflector
address. Knowing the impermanence of an ISP, the user sets his/her Reply-To
field to the reflector address. Shortly after sending a message to a
munging mailing list, the user's ISP goes belly up and the user gets
another ISP with another email address. This is no problem for his/her
friends, who all use the reflector address to send him/her email, but
anyone reading the mailing list has no way of knowing how to contact this
person until his/her next post.
} 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.
If you don't want to see pornographic websites is it the responsibility of
your ISP to filter it out or is it something your web client software
should handle? If you want to read syndicated web pages should a web portal
be the only interface or should you be able to configure your own client to
put data together how you want it? Centralization takes power and
flexibility away from the individual. The list should do a minimum of
munging not because there's something vaguely wrong with munging in
general, but because the centralized system should avoid reducing the power
and flexibility available to the individual.
} Wulfmann
--Greg
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