Dragaera

Mailing List Etiquette

Thu Feb 12 19:40:02 PST 2004

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 05:33:54PM -0600, Bryan Newell wrote:

> 1. When I reply to a message on this list, should I be replying to both the
> user and the mailing list, or just the list?  I realize when I only want to

List.

In my telnet/text-based mailer, mutt, this is easy, even for a list without
Reply-To headers.  I've told mutt about the address for this list, and can hit
a different key and send only to the list.  This is distinct from reply or
group-reply.

Conversely, I have procmail filter my mailing lists into different mailboxes,
so duplicates aren't two messages in my inbox, but a message in the listbox
and a message in my inbox.  Annoying.


Separately, on the list/web forum thing: e-mail has been improved for years
for the purpose of two-way communication, from protocols to user programs.  It
is good.  Usenet is also fairly good and I don't care either way, though I see
no reason to change a list to a newsgroup.

The web is a lot younger and mostly meant for one-way communication; web fora
are hacks, and while they work they're primitive.  Checking many fora is much
slower than checking many mailing lists or newsgroups, at least in my setup;
each website has to be visited while new list or newsgroup messages are
apparent as a whole.  And it's easy to save messages of note.

What the web is good for is archiving messages; I used to have mailing lists
archived with hypermail, which made good threaded indexes.  These days I think
the mailman list software automatically makes decent archives, and it's my
first choice for running a list, not that I've looked at all the software,
mostly just majordomo and mailman.  As people said, the possibly missing
element would be the ability to look in the archives, reply to a message, and
have it threaded properly, thereby closing the list/archive loop.

At Caltech I worked on an early forum, "HyperForum", and at IU lots of classes
use an Oncourse system which is mostly inferior to a mailing list + website,
though it seems to automate access control and assignment/grading type stuff.

-xx- Damien X-)