On 2017-06-09 at 10:47, Nicolas George wrote: > Le primidi 21 prairial, an CCXXV, Charlie Kravetz a écrit : > >> When replying to the mailing list, hit reply. Do not use "Reply to >> All", since that sends individual emails to the person you are >> answering. > > This recommendation is unsustainable and should be eliminated from > the guidelines. It only exists because the mailing-list server is > not configured correctly. > > The reply-to-list feature is flawed because it requires the user to > give special attention each time "am I replying to a personal mail or > to a mailing-list"? The correct behaviour should be the default, > always, because that is the only way to minimize mistakes. This is > what happens with mailing-list servers properly configured.
Agreed. > When replying to a mail, any mail, use reply-to-all, unless you > actively know you want to reply to an unusual subset of recipients. > (But heed the reply-to headers, of course.) Disagreed. This results in sending extra copies to people who are subscribed to the list, which is incorrect. The only time you should send a copy of a message both to the list and to someone who is subscribed to the list is when you specifically want to draw that person's attention to that particular message, e.g. if you think they might otherwise miss it among the rest of the list traffic, or if you have the mistaken impression that they are not subscribed to the list. Just as it's bad to require the user to check "am I replying to a personal mail or to the mailing list?" every time, it's equally bad to require the user to check "did this reply include addressees which it shouldn't, or omit ones which it should?" every time. Using "Reply to All" as your default action leads to the latter situation. Ideally, things would be configured so that simple Reply would work correctly in all cases (and I have indistinct memories of mailing-list discussions in years long past where this seemed to in fact be the case); however, I'm not certain of how to achieve that in practice. Regardless, Reply-to-All as the "use as baseline default" is simply not a good approach. > If somebody complain, tell them to set up their mail headers, just as > I did mine. Are there pages out there documenting how to configure various mail clients (much less Webmail!) to do this automatically? Because tweaking mail headers by hand on every reply is unwieldy and impractical, and people are simply not going to do that. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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