[rescue] wrong list?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, April 3, 2002 at 00:01:19 (-0600), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] wrong list?
>
> > (of course all the other lists I'm on suffer from the "reply-all"
> > syndrome, though personally I deal with that by setting the reply-to as
> > appropriate myself and I usually only get "burned" when I try to suggest
> > all followups to my post should be private but not everyone plays along....)
> 
> And this is a problem?

yes -- especially when it keeps compounding itself.  I really don't like
getting multiple copies of the same posting, and similarly I don't
really like to send multiple individual copies to all the people who've
participated in a thread so far.

I used to try to train people to set reply-to to the list if they didn't
want multiple copies, but I've given up this grandiose plan -- there are
just too many MUAs with which I'm not familiar enough with.

These days I generally just clean up the headers myself and reply only
to the list for subscriber-only lists, only CC'ing the person I'm
replying to if the list is "open" or gatewayed to Usenet or similar.  On
some lists still see a surprising number of threads where everyone's
replying to everyone else and to the list.

> [1] I use PINE.  If "Reply-to" is set, and it's not equal to "From", it
>     prompts me for which I wish to send the reply to.  Most other MUAs
>     have similar functionality, even if it's implemented differently.

Pine certainly is one of the better MUAs w.r.t. "reply-to" handling, but
it's far from perfect.

Mutt confuses things (IMO) somewhat with its 'ignore_list_reply_to'
feature and mis-named 'group-reply' function.  On the other hand it has
a 'list-reply' function that "Does The Right Thing(tm)", exactly the
same sort of thing I've been wanting to implement in VM

Maybe there are lots of Mutt users on this list?

Mutt has also been trying to promote the highly contentious
Mail-Followup-To header (promoted by DJB and originally proposed in an
IETF DRUMS draft by Jacob Palme).  I've not made my mind up on that one
yet, and the draft has expired, but I would tend to lean away from it....

I still think the best level-headed thinking on this subject was put
forth by Robert Elz in his own IETF DRUMS draft, which unfortunately
has also expired without forward motion.

Keith Moore has made a nice summary of the associated problems, taking
rather great care not to prejudice any solution one way or another:

	http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/reply-problem-list.txt

The real solution is of course to encourage the responder to actually
think about where the message he or she is writing needs to go, and make
it easy for that person to get the desired behavior from the MUA.  The
prerequisite to this though is that mailing list managers must stop
munging the reply-to header.  The solution lies in the MUA, not the MLM.
Munging the reply-to header (or the from header, or even the
mail-{followup,reply}-to headers) makes it much more difficult, and
sometimes impossible, to do the right thing in the MUA.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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