dups

[John]

Michael Shigorin wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 02:34:15PM +0200, Jongilanga Guma wrote:
> 
>>I get 2 copies of your email, please fix,
> 
> 
> One directly via Cc:, another via mailing list.
> 
> Some people tend to think dups are worse than not having
> crossposts archived in every mailbox they get sorted to;
> then they do something like this in ~/.procmailrc:
> 
> ---
> MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
> 
> # most important rules here
> 
> :0 Whc: msgid.lock
> | formail -D 65536 msgid.cache
> 
> :0 a:
> duplicates
> 
> # spam filtering and mbox scattering here
> ---

Problems:
1. Not everyone, not even everyone using Linux _can_ use procmail for 
filtering.
2. Weeding duplicates causes the wrong one to be deleted: Odds are you 
will get my reply directly from me before the copy from the list 
arrives. If you then reply to the list, you _may_ cause what I intended 
as a private reply to become public.
2a. Some mailing-list software, including mailman I think, can filter 
out apparent duplicates. I find this causes confusion and I don't 
recommend it.
3. I generally regard duplicate replies as grossly discourteous, and I'm 
not alone in that view. You will give offence.

I do not know of any sound reason to reply directly to the originator 
when the reply is alos being sent to the list, and often reasoning for 
replying to originator and not the list is faulty.

Note that on this occasion I've replied directly to Michael in addition 
to to the list. If  Michael is weeding duplicates he probably won't see 
the cop sent by the list-management software.