On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 10:53:56AM -0400, David Shugarts wrote:
> I am a member of about six or eight lists and I operate two myself. The only
> ones that DON'T reply to the list are this MySQL list and the PHP list. Most
> of my list members that I support (non-technical people, mainly) came to the
> particular list believing that this is what is meant by a mailing list.
May I ask how many of those are Yahoo or other bulk-hosted mailing lists?
This has been debated ad nauseum, but the issue remains standards:
If your software doesn't support the feature you want, nag the company until
it does. In this case, I'm assuming you don't have the ability to reply to
the well-specified List address in the mailing headers with a single button
or hotkey in your software. I, on the other hand, simply hit 'l' to reply
to the list instead of to the sender.
The first time you try to send a private reply to a person on a mailing list
that !@#'s up reply-to:'s, you'll curse those settings as well. Not to
mention the ones that mangle sender: or from: addresses so as to change how
vacation and bounce software work.
'Reply-To:' is for the user to configure what E-mail address to use in replies.
'From:' is to specify who sent the message.
Neither is to specify a mailing list.
Last I checked, even on Outlook Express (probably the worst E-mail software
ever written), its a simple matter to add an address called 'mysql' that
points to the list so that the exact keystrokes required to reply to the list
would be:
^R (open reply window)
'mysql' <TAB><TAB> (get out of To:, get out of Subject:)
* type message
However, this has been debated by much more important people than myself; feel
free to read the mailing list archives for the standard reply from those who
run this list or take a look at:
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
- An almost famous text on why not to change reply-to
http://www.mindspring.com/~pwiseman/reply-to.html
- More details on why not to change it, citing the article above.
http://russnelson.com/rt.html
- A very short treatise on the subject, including suggestions
And for the sake of proving I've read pro-munging texts as well:
http://www.metasystema.org/essays/reply-to-useful.mhtml
- Bases most of its arguments on 'minimal bandwidth'.
--
Michael T. Babcock
CTO, FibreSpeed Ltd. (Hosting, Security, Consultation, Database, etc)
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/
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