Re: [Aoetools-discuss] administrivia: reply-to

[Andrei L. <an...@la...>]

I got your reply *after* I wrote my reply to Sam Hopkins.

I will use Reply to All, it's OK form me. I never thought that it was so 
controversial issue :-).

Andrei

Ed L. Cashin wrote:
> Hi, Andrei Levin.  Thanks very much for the information.  It sounds
> like you are suffering from the problem that Sam mentioned, where XFS
> is handing out pages that don't have a reference count.
> 
> I thought I'd address your question about the mailing list.
> 
> On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 05:39:20PM +0100, Andrei Levin wrote:
> ...
>> P.S. Is it possible to setup a Mailing list in such a way that when you 
>> press a "reply" button you send a message to the list and not to the 
>> author of a mail?
> 
> Believe it or not, this is a controversial issue.  The sourceforge
> site takes a stance against doing that, and I do too, based on my
> opinion that setting the reply-to header is only more convenient to
> those who don't have a working reply-to-all feature in their mail
> software.
> 
> This is what I said about the matter in 2001.
> 
>   > Yes, but then you could say that the only reason for that confusion is
>   > that people don't know the difference between "reply" and "reply to
>   > all", and the reason they don't know is that listserv owners with good
>   > intentions have *broken* the distinction in an attempt to hand-hold the
>   > users.
>   > 
>   > For instance, I wanted to reply to you personally, since this thread
>   > is off topic, but since the Reply-To header was set to the list, I had
>   > to manually edit the headers after hitting reply.  That's not
>   > convenience.  
> 
> In fact, that's a major disadvantage of setting the reply-to header to
> the list.  People get embarassed by sending personal email to the
> list.  It isn't their fault, either, since they used "reply", which
> means they wanted to reply to the author.  The list isn't the author,
> so I think that the mailing list administrator is responsible for the
> mistake in these embarassing situations.
> 
>   > If no one messes with the headers, then we have convenience: a reply
>   > goes to the author, and a reply-to-all goes to all.  It's easy enough
>   > to make two different keystrokes or two different buttons to click,
>   > and then there's none of this confusion.  The confusion comes from the
>   > ambiguity that results when the headers are changed.  Then "reply"
>   > doesn't mean reply anymore, it means reply-to-all, and reply-to-all is
>   > meaningless.  Then you've lost a helpful, convenient, and realistic
>   > distinction.  
>   > 
>   > There *is* a distinction; the users cannot really gain anything through
>   > ignorance of the distinction, so we aren't helping them out by
>   > supporting the ignorance of the distinction.  But if instead they
>   > recognize the distinction, then they can act intentionally.  The way
>   > it is now, the distinction is blurred, and people are always doing
>   > what they didn't mean to do.
>   > 
>   > Sure it works both ways, if we went back to leaving the headers alone
>   > tomorrow, some reply mail intended for the list would go to the
>   > original author's instead, but then the distinction would be clear,
>   > and the sender would learn that next time all they'd have to do is use
>   > reply-to-all instead of reply.  That learning experience would empower
>   > them, and the experience certainly wouldn't be as negative as having a
>   > personal email mistakenly broadcasted to a mailing list.
>   > 
>   > Really, though, I don't have any hope, since it's too late.  The
>   > practice of breaking the distinction between reply and reply-to-all is
>   > so firmly entrenched that it doesn't look like going back is a
>   > possibility.  There are some other advocates, though.  The GNU mailman
>   > help on sourceforge for list administrators strongly recommends
>   > against setting the "Reply-To: " header.
>   > 
>   > ... Oh, well.  :)  
> 


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