Neil wrote:
Courtesy Cc's aren't necessarily a bad thing, and a lot of mailing
list software can be configured to ensure only 1 copy reaches the
individual.
But the mailing list does that by looking at the Cc header and not
sending a copy to people in that header. If you Bcc everyone instead
of Cc-ing them, then yeah, the mailing list server won't be aware of
those copies and you're going to create a bunch of duplicates and
annoy people.
The Mailman list software makes the "Avoid duplicate copies of
messages?" option available to subscribers. Personally, I don't like it
because the courtesy CC's lack the List-Id headers that are so useful
for filtering into appropriate folders. I disable that for myself on
any lists that have it enabled by default.
Ideally, my mail client would notify me when a duplicate copy of a mail
has been received in a different folder and notify me in some way, or
even delete the duplicate from the inbox. It would also be nice for
mailing lists if messages that were either CC'd to me or has In-Reply-To
pointing to a message of mine, could be highlighted in some way,
especially for new messages.
I understand that some people may want a copy to go to their inbox and
a copy to go to their mailing list folder. If so, they should be
making the rules to implement that themselves (perhaps with the help
of a courtesy Cc). The sender, however, should not be making that
decision for them.
It's always the sender that decides whether or not to include a courtesy
CC. The recipient can't decide for them after the fact. But the
recipient can have a mail client that deals with it in a sensible and
useful way.
And unless you're replying to dozens of emails at a time, I don't
think the Cc header is going to get too cluttered. Even under about 10
addresses isn't too bad. And if you are responding to a dozen emails
with one of your own, you may wish to reconsider your writing style...
Most of the time, in general discussions, bulk replying to that many is
not necessary. But there are times when sending one bulk reply to a
long thread with dozens of participants is better than sending a bunch
of individual replies. My use case, specifically, is that one of my
jobs is to write specs within the W3C, and these can often receive a lot
of technical feedback from a lot of people and end up with long
discussion threads discussing the best way for the spec to define things.
It's the responsibility of the editor to take all of this feedback,
review it all, make a decision and edit the spec appropriately.
Particularly in cases where there are long threads discussing a topic,
with multiple suggestions spread across many e-mails, it is
significantly easier to send one bulk reply to all of the points made
with a nice conclusion at the end.
Depending on how much needs to be done, the issue and thread can lay
dormant for months, or even years in extreme cases, as it waits in the
queue to be addressed. This is where courtesy CC's really make a lot of
sense. They send a clear notice to the thread participants, who are
likely to have moved on to discussing a wide range of other topics in in
the mean time, that this particular issue has now been addressed. Some
of these participants may have even unsubscribed since, and wouldn't get
the response from the list either, but but most people still appreciate
a reply eventually.
Such bulk replies serve as a convenient overview of past discussions to
refresh the memory of both the participants at the time, and inform
newer subscribers; and they provide a nice summary and decision record
that can be easily referred to later. This is also the model that Hixie
often uses for editing the HTML5 spec, which I'm also heavily involved
with, and it works quite well in that situation. (In this case in
particular, it wasn't unheard of for there to be 3 or 4 years between
when a thread took place and the issue finally got addressed, simply
because of priorities and the amount of other issues in the queue.)
(I'll also note that for spec writing, I use my e-mail itself as an
issue tracker, and so I would really appreciate it if Letters had some
feature to make this easier.)
In general, constantly Bcc-ing a lot of addresses by default seems
like a bad idea to me. You're not really protecting anyone, removing
information that people might use to help them manage their mail, and
it's the sort of behavior that spammers employ.
I can accept it being set to CC by default. It's easy enough to change
it manually, if desired. I usuaully do CC if it's only a handful of
recipeints, but in cases where there are dozens, then it's easier to BCC
so that further replies just go to the list, rather than 20 or 30 other
participants.
--
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/
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