Re: Q: List Policy
On Saturday 22 November 2008 10:44:35 Teemu Likonen wrote:
> Steve Lamb (2008-11-22 04:40 -0800) wrote:
> > That is absolute, 100% pure rubbish. This is solvable by technical
> > means, right now, today, if email client authors would just implement
> > a feature [...]
> I think that "being solvable" is not an option. Too many if's in your
> message.
No, there was one. If they implemented scoring. I went on to explain
that it is still possible today through other means. Scoring, however, is one
of the most efficient ways of handling a large volume of correspondence in a
public forum. I feel that email clients would benefit from letting people
score mailing lists. But that isn't a requirement to spot mail to you in a
list.
> I'd like to remind everybody that email is a distributed
> system.
Yes, so the axiom of any distributed system applies. *Be CONSERVATIVE IN
WHAT YOU SEND, be liberal in what you accept.* Message + CC is not
conservative.
> We can't control what others do, we can only choose what we do
> ourselves and which mail messages we pay attention to.
None of the situations you cited are compelling enough to warrant the
complete duplication of every message the list server sends out. Not a one.
> In short, we don't know how others receive, read and compose their mail,
> or who are subscribers of certain mailing list (people join and leave
> all the time).
Exactly. That is why we provide CCs *when requested* because that is the
*conservative* approach on what to send. We're presuming they can take care
of the method of reading replies unless otherwise told. The alternative is
hardly conservative.
> What kind of reply policies and email-client
> configurations we should enforce for these varying situations? I think
> they would soon became quite complicated. How do we make people to
> understand and follow such policies?
I have an idea. Provide CCs when requested, draw up a list of acceptable
behavior in the list and have people read that before they sign up. Call it a
Code of Conduct. Oh... wait...
> Then there's the Debian way: Reply-To is not pointing to the list
> address and using "Reply to all" is discouraged. Some people like this
> policy. Nevertheless, it causes some difficulties: people sometimes
> press "Reply" and thus send mail to the author only while expecting it
> to go to the list. Sometimes they expect something else. Sometimes
> people press "Reply to all" and annoy some other people with
> carbon-copies and duplicate messages. So even with the Debian way,
> depending on the point of view, mail sometimes goes to "wrong" places.
But that is not the point. The point isn't to prevent people from sending
mail to the "wrong" place as "wrong" varies from message to message. The
point is which policy sensibly places the least strain on the greatest number
of people. Defaulting to CC to all means everyone has to either delete all
duplicate messages or implement MDA/MTA/MUA duplicate filters.
Simply put *some* people missing *some* mail *some* of the time or *some*
people sending mail to the "wrong" place *some* of the time is less strain on
the system as a whole compared to *all* people having to manually or
automatically deal with *all* duplicates *all* of the time.
> This is the reality and it's pretty complicated.
I see it as pretty simple. A person posts. They, now, have dozens of
ways to check for replies. There is simply no need for a broad CC-everybody
because someone, somewhere, for some reason might be incapable of getting some
replies.
--
Steve C. Lamb | But who can decide what they dream
PGP Key: 1FC01004 | and dream I do
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