Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com> writes:
> > ??? Replies go the the user that posted it. If you want it to go
> > to the list then you need to either do a group reply or specifically
> > address it to the list.
>
> Most mailers have two different "reply" features: "Reply to just
> the person who sent it" and "Reply to everybody else who received
> it, too".
Neither of which is generally appropriate for a mailing list, so you
have to manually edit the To: field by hand nearly every time, unless
you use a mailreader that allows you to do things like, if the subject
line matches this regular expression, put the message in such-and-such
a group, and for messages in this group, reply to such-and-such an
address by default.
> For mailing lists, the analogous interpretations are that the first
> method goes to the sender only,
Seldom what you want to do. Perhaps 10% of the time at most.
> and you should use the second method to reply to the whole list.
No, this is totally wrong. Absolutely never do this. In almost all
mailreaders, this sends a duplicate copy to the sender, so that he
will get two copies, one from you and one from the list. This is
*extremely* bad manners (especially if you do it repeatedly) and is
horrific netiquette and as such is absolutely never what you want to
do, at any time, for any reason. A very good way to annoy people.
(Having said that, there is one exception: in certain esoteric
circumstances, you may have good reason to believe that the original
sender is for some reason or another not subscribed to the list[1]; in
that case you may want to send him a copy, but that should be done via
Cc generally, or else the list should get its copy via Cc.) If
mailing list software were coded to catch these cases and not send a
copy to anyone already receiving a copy, then this would be a good way
to do things, but unfortunately I do not know of any mailing list
software that does that. Hopefully someday it will. Setting the
Reply-To: is an ugly kludge that can be used meanwhile. (Or we could
all switch to mailreaders that can set the To: field of a reply based
on group and fork messages into groups by matching various expressions
in various headers of the original message. Such functionality does
have other uses as well.)
> This is the way that the faq-maintainers list is currently set up.
i.e., broken.
It's moot for me, because I have Gnus configured to reply to the list
messages correctly, but 99% of mailreaders are unable to be set up
this way, so most users will be stuck manually editing the To: field
every time, which is _substantially_ worse than the (admittedly not
ideal) situation when the Reply-To: field is set.
[1] For example, if the message was Forwarded-by: someone on the list
and includes a statement like "If you could forward this to
such-and-such a mailing list, I'd appreciate it; I can't do it
because I'm not subscribed." This is often considered bad
manners on the sender's part, but perhaps you want to be nice
and accommodate him anyway.
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