Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Why? Isn't the point of replying to a mailing list to send the response > to the sender, which is the list?
Yes, which is why the correct response for the mailing list software is to send replies to the list and not to the author of the message being replied to. Other mail/news clients may be different, but for me the reader's behaviour is consistent whether I am reading private mail, a mailing list or a newsgroup. If I press 'R' it sends the reply only to the author of the message, if I press 'F' (ie reply to all) it does the 'right thing' and either posts to the newsgroup, sends the reply to the mailing list or to all of the other recipients (ie all except me) of the private (ie non-mailing list) email. This is because it can tell the difference between the 3 cases and takes the appropriate action for each one. I would suggest that software which, when replying to a mailing list, sends to both the 'To:' and mailing list address (where they are different) is not behaving correctly. > I'm not meaning to drag this 'argument' back into the spotlight again, I > just really want to know why so many people think it makes "better" > sense to have subscribers to a mailing list receive two replies if the > respondent is responding to a post by the receiver. I don't think so. I think that software which sends 2 copies is broken unless the author has set the 'Mail-Followup-To:' header to specifically request a direct reply. There are two things which I find annoying about mailing lists (neither of which are the fault of the list server/owner). The first is when, having posted, the author of the message receives a number of non-delivery notifications. These should be sent to the envelope sender (which in the case of mailing lists is nearly always the list server/administrator) not to the author of the message. The second is where people who receive the digest version of the list reply to the digest message rather than 'splitting' the digest and replying to the individual message as this a) messes up threading and b) Normally gives no indication in the subject (as the subject shows as something like Re: digest dd/mm/yy") as to which of the many subjects in the digests is being replied to. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
