[OT] Reply-To munging considered *carefully*

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 2009-10-10 at 16:54 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Michael B. Trausch writes:
> 
>  > Ugh, Control+R needs to do what I mean... (Incidentally and off topic,
>  > why is it that I can Control+R to half my mailing lists and reply
>  > meaningfully, but the rest I have to use the button on the toolbar?)
> 
> I don't know if you'll be encouraged by my proposal, since it requires
> fixing your MUA, but an explanation of the issue and a proposal that
> could deal with it once and for all are presented in
> 
> http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Blog/Software/ReplyToMungingConsideredEmCarefullyEm
> 
> Note: it bills itself as a blog and it's implemented as a wiki, but I
> haven't thought at all about blogspam, so it's locked down -- no
> editing and no comments.  Sorry!

Whee, I remembered to click the damn toolbar this time.

I've seen that argument before; it's fine, but the ideal situation is
impossible to achieve (some form of complete consistency amongst all
mailing lists globally).

The most common use-case for mailing lists involves on-list replies.
When the replies are to go off-list, I'm used to the idea of deleting
the ML and any extra To: or Cc: entries and doing a private reply.

At least Alpine would ask when replying to a message that was sent to a
mailing list.  That would be the second best option, but again it would
require some form of global consistency amongst mail client software;
again, not something that is terribly likely to ever occur.

That said, I'd love if it I had the time to fix my mail program so that
it would ask me.  Alas, I'm not sure that's going to be possible for a
little while, if for no other reason than because I have a lot of other
programming projects going on at the moment and I don't have time to
pick apart Evolution's code to figure out where the hell to start in the
first place.  That said, if someone who already understands Evolution's
source code and knows it well can point me in the direction of where to
look, it'd be a lot more likely that I can get to it.

On the topic of the discussion, though, what is better for all is a
default behavior that is correct, say, 95% of the time for 95% of the
people.  I can understand why it's not that way on the lists that choose
not to do it that way; but given that there _are_ lists that do it that
way, and quite a lot of them, I think it's best that list managers go
for the default case.  Since I've switched back to Evolution, on 3 or so
of the MLs I'm on, I _constantly_ get "Did you mean to send that to the
mailing list?"  Well, yes, I did:  I like to only use the keyboard.  So,
why should I have to move my hand to the mouse and do something when I'd
rather not?  In any case, it's off-topic, and unless others here are
interested in the discussion, or there's a chance that the ML config
would be changed, it's probably best just to drop it altogether.

	--- Mike

-- 
Blog:  http://mike.trausch.us/blog/
Misc. Software:  http://mike.trausch.us/software/

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too
high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving
our mark.” —Michelangelo