On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Graham Murray wrote:
I disagree. Reply to all is (normally) the correct way of sending a reply to a mailing list. Using 'reply' should send a private email to the poster of the message. If the mail client is 'doing the right thing', then it will just send the message to the mailing list when using 'reply to all'. That is certainly what has happened when I composed this reply. So I think it is the mail software which is doing the wrong thing, when sending to both robin and 'not' robin, and the user doing the right thing.
On the other hand, I do not think that the mailing list should set (or override that set by the author) the Reply-to: header to point to the mailing list. But that is a completely different and controversial matter.
Metaphorically speaking a mail list is a round-table discussion. This means that "normally" a reply should go out to the list (the round-table participants). If the default setting would be to reply only to the sender then the round-table discussion is by-passed (sender & receiver steps out) and made irrelevant which imho doesn't make sense. A reply-to-all is usually an annoyance since this usually means that participants will be getting multiple mails. The reply-to-all paradigm works only in a simple "mail-list" which doesn't have a maillist-daemon (like ezmlm).
Best regards
Peter K
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