OT: Steve Jobs' Walled Garden is Crumbling

[Kevin Hunter]

At 6:57pm -0400 Fri, 14 May 2010, David Sanders wrote:
> p.s when will this ******* list just give in and set the reply-to
> header? I've had enough frankly.

I thought along similar lines until about 3 weeks ago when this rebuttal
ran across my desk:

http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

Despite the very salient points Chip Rosenthal (author) made years ago,
the debate rages on.  More recent arguments for either method may exist,
but I don't think much has changed since then (except perhaps slightly
more intelligent mail client decisions and implementations).

Briefly, the pertinent points of the article (to me):

- More often than not, a private message sent to a list is worse than
the reverse.  Even "professionals" don't perfectly execute their
intentions and are likely to make a mistake.

- The learning curve to remember to reply "to list"/"to all" is much
more appropriate than the harm to a community when you meant to reply to
a single person instead.  (For myself and Thunderbird, the difference is
Ctrl+R vs Ctrl+Shift+R.)

- From a technological and semantic perspective, replacing the Reply-To
header irrevocably expunges a piece of information in the communication.
 (Think of this from an archivists point of view.)

I personally don't care, and can work with both.  Chip made an argument
that convinced me which is "better."  But, you can read the article and
draw your own conclusions.  :-)

Cheers,

Kevin