mail to individuals

[Samuel Thurston, III]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 5:16 AM, Odd <iodine at runbox.no> wrote:
> Any reason you sent this to me offlist instead of here? The discussion
> is onlist, so I'll continue it here.
>

The reason was it's all been posted to the list before, over and over,
every time this discussion comes up which seems to be about every 2-3
weeks.  While at first this point may seem like "damning evidence"
that the setting needs to be changed on the list, it is actually more
indicative of the fact that the people who raise the issue don't
bother checking the archive to see how many thousands of times it's
been rehashed.

Also this is a great discussion except for two things: 1) as I just
mentioned it's been rehashed a thousand times, and 2) you're not
bothering to do any research on the topic at all, just saying "i don't
like it therefore it must be broken" and "everybody else does it the
broken way, why won't ubuntu just capitulate?"

> A draft you say? How is a draft a standard?

You don't seem to understand the concept of the IETF draft process.
Please do your own research.


> And this has _what_ to do with the topic at hand? I would like
> you to point out, since you've said it so many times now, _where_
> exactly this reply-to policy is defined as a STANDARD. Can you
> do that, please?

These are THE reference documents that define how the email transport
protocols work and how clients should interact with them.  There is no
other standard to adhere to.  The 2822 document obsoletes RFC 822 from
1982, you know, before AOL infested the internet with non-geeks.
They're actually quite brilliant RFC's and instead of ranting at me
about how they're not a STANDARD you might consider acquainting
yourself with them, and how the IETF draft process works.

>> It's your right to disagree.  Maybe you don't like the 9 button on
>> your phone.
>
> That's the best you can come up with? Sad really. Not having a 9
> button would obviously destroy the ability to use that phone in
> many cases. The matter we're discussing has no destructive
> consequences at all, either way it's done.

 For properly-functoning email clients, your solution leaves a person
to cut and paste to reply to the sender only, and really doesn't
provide anything of value since even if you don't like the reply to
list feature you can simply hit "reply all" and everything's hunky
dory.

You're asking ubuntu to change their "number" because your client
doesn't play nice with it.  it's really an apt analogy.

>
>>>> Lets try to get more
>>>> things working the right way instead of breaking more things to
>>>> accommodate other broken things... like they do in the windows world.
>>> This is a small matter. I don't even see why there's a RFC about it,
>>> when common sense is all you need to see what's the right way to
>>> do it.
>>
>> interesting that rather than counter the valid argument that we
>> shouldn't break one end of the equation to match the other broken end,
>
> Because I've already said multiple times that it's about doing
> it the right way, using common sense. Your way is illogical,
> even if there's an RFC about it that you can't even say is a
> standard.

Illogical to you.  Not illogical to the network engineers writing on
behalf of the IETF with regard to how email should function, or to
those of us who have been using lists for much longer than ubuntu was
around.

>
>> your answer is it's a "small matter"
>
> It's just like we should have a RFC for what text color one
> should use for text in mail. Just use your head. Don't use
> white on white. Goes without saying.

It's really not so cut and dried.  Obviously I am not the only person
holding my opinion.

Please see the widely read http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
and http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html

>
> If so, you have already lost since almost all lists do it counter
> to what you want.

This is your experience.  I don't know what kind of lists you are
posting to, but it is not my experience.  I tend not to stay on the
lists that are configured that way, since they often have a lot of
newbie users who don't understand this apparently complicated and
nuanced issue, that amounts to "use reply all or ctrl L/shift L"

>
>> For those of us who've been posting to
>> lists since the late 80's and early 90's, this recent trend of
>> screwing up the headers is a real pain.
>
> No it isn't. I've used mailing list since the late 80s myself. So i'm
> clearly not a part of those you imagine support your view. And
> I imagine there are many other old-timers who agree with me,
> not you.

I suppose so, but you're clearly not going to convince me that your
way is right, and I'm guessing it's less likely that I'm going to
convince you.  So let's "agree to disagree" and let this thread die
the death it should die.  It's been brought up enough times that if it
was going to be changed it would have changed.