On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 12:33:40AM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 15:16 -0600, Richard Laager wrote:
I see you've added a Reply-To header later. The canonical response in this case is for someone to reference: http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
A canonical response to that is
http://www.metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.mhtml
This all could be solved nicely if there was a header that means "don't include me in the reply-to-all list".
Active threads tend to pick up contributors: how would you try to honor all of the preferences of all of the people who might end up in the cc list? You can't really trust the existing CC list to have been properly vetted (for some version of "proper").
With regard to reply-to munging and cc preferences you just get into an unmanageable matrix of conflicting opinions and wishes. It's just better to:
be deliberate about where you're sending, so you aren't hapharzardly at the whim of your tools and environment. If you make a mistake, at least do it on purpose :)
manage your own inbox, don't ask others to remember your preferences.
You really can't please everybody.
Incidentally, my approach, for any list where I think discussions ought to stay on list, is to guarantee a Mail-Followup-To header in message as it comes into my inbox, and to use a mail reader that looks at it when I ask it to reply to the list and which conversely ignores it when I ask it to reply to the sender. (I've gotten flack for this from people who for some reason think I'm not allowed to add this header on my own mail sitting in my own inbox, but naturally I don't agree with them.) This gives me the choice of behaviors that I want. And I still review the outgoing header before I let it fly.
Hmm, I guess this must be my day for giving bicycle shed opinions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_Parkinson's_Bicycle_Shed_Effect
-mm-