The Ports Tree -up-dating

[Thomas Hurst]

* Dominic Mitchell (dom at happygiraffe.net) wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 10, 2001 at 05:04:25PM +0000, Danny Horne wrote:
> > On Sat, 10 Nov 2001 16:59:33 +0000
> > Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst at clara.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > Blegh, hit r instead of g. I suck.
> > 
> > Hee!!  Is it just me that would prefer that mailing lists were
> > configured to set the reply-to address as the list address rather than
> > the original senders address?
> 
> Please count this as a vote against such a proposal.  Reply-To on
> mailing lists is an evil concept (Google for "Reply-To considered
> harmful").

Out of the 25 or so mailing lists I'm on, about 20 of them set
Reply-To:.  This breaks 'The Principle of Least Surprise' because it is
now standard behaviour for Reply to go to the list (and indeed, when I
hit reply, I expect to reply to the interested parties, not just the
recipient.  Don't blame me if I was brought up on a mixure of Yam, Thor
and Agent :P)

Group reply is a silly concept which I have yet to see any justification
for on a mailing list, with the questionable exception of the mail
being crossposted to other lists and people outside the list.  Other
than these relatively rare occurances on most lists, it just serves to
produce more pointless traffic, and fills my precious inbox with more
useless duplicated junk I expect to stick to the list folder.

However, I don't expect the behaviour of the list to change - both ways
of operating lists are too well ingrained and will not change, so the
better way to deal with it is to configure software to work around the
split behaviour.  Gnn.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky at aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/