Brad Knowles writes: > There are ways to force all replies to go back to the mailing list, yes.
To expand a bit on what Brad said, there is a general, standard way to set the address(es) that will be used for a basic reply. I forget where in the Mailman interface it is (I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot barge pole) but "Reply-To" is the keyword you're looking for. Before you go searching for it, though, consider that (1) The intent of the Reply-To standard is to provide *authors*, not mailing lists, with a way to specify *where the author* should be contacted (on a paper document with multiple authors, this is often identified as the "correspondence address"). As such, almost all mail clients treat it as Word from On High. In particular, with many mail clients users are forced to type in any other address (or get it from their contact list), making private replies extremely inconvenient. But typically private replies are more urgent and more sensitive. A message that was intended to be public that goes only to the author is a safer failure mode than a private message inadvertently published. In your case, at first glance it sounds like it's pretty safe. The community members are moderated, so intemperate replies from the peanut gallery can be held and you can ask the person if they really wanted to send that. But think about the failure mode: the board members are *unmoderated*. A sharp reply, or an inside joke, by one of them *will be automatically passed through*, and could easily damage the board's reputation severely (unless they're all angels...). I've also seen it used as an excuse for posting things that shouldn't have been written in the first place. "I'm really sorry if somebody's feelings were hurt, but it's not my fault! I didn't realize that it was going to go to the whole list...." (2) There is a standard, which Mailman participates in, called "List-Post". A reasonably good mail client will generally offer a Reply-to-List command that prefers that address to the author for ordinary replies, but falls back to the author otherwise. If your community members use such a client, they'll generally get the best of both worlds: a flexible client with convenient ways to reply to author, to list, or to all, with a single command that works almost all the time. Unfortunately I don't know of any for Windows or the Mac offhand (I use Unix-style clients on Linux or the Mac), but you might try getting people to look at the help for their mail clients. It pays off in the long run with a more smoothly running list. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9