> In my experience, the more technically adept the members So your desire is to restrict the discussion about Brust's fiction to the technically adept? > of a list > are, the more likely they are to do things *this* way, > that is, NOT > to munge the reply-to headers. Yes, some lists of geeks munge > headers. Many do not. I think you're making huge assumptions about the configurations of lists. Without some effort of surveying "all" (which is probably not worthwhile) lists in existance, I wouldn't be bold enough to say that either configuration had the "many" or "majority" position. :) > Sourceforge.net hosts THOUSANDS of mailing lists- their policy is > not to munge. That's not necessarily an indicator...Yahoo! Groups probably has lists in the "thousands", and the Reply-To is configurable, I'm sure the other providers of similar services are similarly configuraable. Additionally, Sourceforge's intended audience is different from that of a fan-list. Hmm. Also, with sourceforge, you have to be careful not to confuse "forum" with "mailing list". They provide _both_, and the forums have "subscription" functionality, which send you copies of the posts to those forums you subscribe...which you can't reply to at all >from your mailer. Even more obnoxious than the reply-to of this list (to the point that I only monitor those discussions, because it requires too much time and effort for me to reply). However, I can see why you wanted to comment on "how many do it this way or that". Because I appeared to be. My intent was to indicate not "how many lists in the world do this way" but how many that *I* have to deal with. Since I have to make a "mental exception" for this list, I have _often_ not replied, or aborted a reply, because a) I'm often in a hurry when doing e-mail and b) I instinctively used "reply" instead of "reply-to-all" and simply gave up, because it exceeded my effort/time level. *chuckle*. Then again, you may regard that as a "feature", that'd be less noise from me! ;) > To those who say that sending replies to sender instead > of munging > wastes bandwidth: We're supposed to be intelligent, > learning beings. > We've got opposable thumbs, and can have flame-free > discussions on > religion. Remembering something THIS BASIC is NOT HARD, folks. Why should I have to remember it? The point of computing is to make it _easier_, not harder. It's to make it _faster_, not slower. > Think of it this way... the mailing list isn't a person, it's a Umm....I hope no one thinks of the list as a person. :) :) ;) > way to facilitate mail delivery within a topic. As with personal > email, when you hit reply, your email will be sent to But...it's not personal e-mail. If I want to have a discussion with you personally...I would initiate one. To have the "default" be the what I do least is counter to usability. :). It'd be interesting to see the results of a list that the reply-to was configurable on a per user basis.., e.g., for you, it'd be sent with the author of the message as a reply-to, for me, it'd be "dragaera at dragaera.info" (Hmm...Dragaera is interesting to type on the laptop). I suspect that it would dramatically compound the problem, since no one would have any consistent guide as to how the list was working. :) > the *person* > who sent the email you're replying to, not the delivery system. > (Yes, it's more complex than that, and no, I'm not going > to go into > the workings of SMTP and the like. Close enough.) > It's really not hard to remember gang, and DDB's right. If you > accidentally reply to sender instead of the list, it's ONE email > inconveniening two people, the sender and the recipient. The > sender has to resend to list, and the recipient will get an > extra copy of the message. .... > Other way around: You slip for a message meant for DDB alone, > and inconvenience the whole list, wasting a lot more bandwidth, > and possibly embarrassing yourself or DDB or both with the > contents of your hero worship mail. This is possibly a qualitative vs. quantitive issue. If you only ever have an equal number of instances of both "errors" then I would agree with you. However, I don't believe that to be the case. It's my belief that the majority of "replies" are back to the list. Of course, since I largely only have myself to judge acurrately, I could be completely wrong in that belief. Assuming my belief is true, having the reply-to set to the sender rather than the list, adds extra work and effort to the majority to save the few from "forgetting" and making a mistake. Which brings me to this quote from your message (moved out of order for effect): > If your memory is REALLY that bad, put a post-it note on your > monitor frame. Good idea. :) > Go one step further. Some putz puts a "vacation" autoresponder > on their email address, responding to EVERY message they get for > the week they're not checking their mail. Every message goes to > the list, and causes a mail loop. Bad Juju. (Yes, many smart > mailing list packages have patches to avoid this... but just as > not all email clients aren't smart enough to handle "reply to > list," so are not all mailing lists able to handle loops. > If we're catering to mediocrity, we'd best do so on both sides.) I'm not sure this is relevant. It's bringing in a completely separate issue: Do's and Don'ts of auto-responder/vacation replies. And nearly in the same breath, you present the correct solution to the problem. Either change the list-processor to prevent e-mail loops of the type you describe, or replace it with one that does. :) There are other causes of mail loops (misconfigured SMTP servers come to mind) besides vacation replies. :) Also, adding a patch or modification to a _server_ to improve functionality is preferable to forcing users to use your idea of the "correct mailer" to achieve that same functionality. If it is possible to fix a problem at the server, it is likely that it should be. :)