..on Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 12:21:54PM -0400, R. Jason Cronk wrote: > Can I vote reply-to-null? That would prevent all mishaps. > > Seriously though, this presents an interesting display of the > trade-offs between privacy risks and convenience of use. Given that > the purpose of the list is to perpetuate an ongoing discussion, the > convenience of replying to the entire list seems to outweigh the > risk of revealing private information. Optimally, the from header > should say liberationtech with a inline note at the top identifying > the author is. This would reduce (though not eliminate) the risk of > someone misidentifying the intended recipient of their reply. I > don't think the list software supports such configuration though. > > Just as a point of analysis, I've seen distribution lists that were > intended to be one way (i.e. a few authorized individuals may send > out messages) but were configured wrong such that replies not only > were sent to the list, but the list allowed anybody, not just > authorized individuals, to post. Contextually, this is much > different, and the analysis would weigh in favor of making such a > list reply to sender, not reply to all. However, in those cases, > the problem results from a misconfiguration not a failure to weight > the risks.
Don't people simply need to take responsibility for noting where and to whom they are sending their emails? Reply-to-sender seems like a very odd default on a mailing list - more so if implemented to 'protect us from ourselves'. If I want to reply to the sender, I will do so, but by default I expect when subscribed to a mailing list I'm there for the open discussion. Society is risky! Cheers, -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
