This Mailinglist - another vote for sanity

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 04:21:23PM -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> > For all you people with the "Reply to List" option in your MUA, would
> > this proposed change in behaviour affect this functionality of your
> > MUA?  If not, then why do you care?
> 
> And, a follow-up question/thought: for those who advocate for The Way
> Things Are (TM), what % of the time do you use Reply-To-List and
> Reply-To-Sender? If it's 90%:10% I can see how changing to The Way I
> Think It Should Work (TM) would be slightly disruptive to your
> communications, but, then again, if that's how you work, why are you
> on a mailing list?

You're assuming that everyone reading the list is subscribed, and that
all the discusions on this list take place _only_ on this list; and that
ain't necessarily so. That mistake makes you only consider the case of
on list communication between two subscribers; if that was all that was
happening then reply-to mangling would be relatively harmless. However,
that simply _isn't_ all that's happening - just recently there was a
discussion cross-posted to -users and -devel that reached both
audiences. Had the lists changed the reply-to headers then it would have
split the discussion because replies posted by -devel subscribers would
have been invisible to -users readers and vice versa. Equally, imagine a
non-subscriber posting; the current approach would allow people to use
'reply to all' so that both the poster and the list get responses;
reply-to mangling would force all replies to the list so they'd never
see any answers to their post.

You're right that reply-to mangling can be helpful on closed lists where
the only choice is whether to reply to another subscriber on or off
list; what you're missing is that it completely breaks several other,
useful, modes of discussion.

Ewan
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