[petsc-dev] On "Reply-To" munging

[David sheehan]

Thanks Satish. 'reply' of my gmail account responses to PETSc <
petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov>
automatically in this mail list. Every time I just used 'reply' instead of
'reply all'. I just find,
if I want to reply to the sender in this mail list, I have to manually copy
the sender's email
address to the current reply, but it will be OK for me to do it this way in
future. Appreciate
you guys for helping me so much. Hope you guys continuing to help me.

Best Regards,

David

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Sure 'reply-to:list' is not perfect.
>
> But I'd rather keep this than deal with folks doing 'reply' - and
> sending e-mails to individuals instead of doing 'reply-all - to list'.
>
> Sure the 'reply-to-harmful' folks say: the user has the choice between
> 'reply' and 'reply-all' and 'reply-to:list' removes this choice [hence
> harmful].
>
> But I don't buy this argument. I think the default choice should be
> the most-commmon used item. And for lists 'reply-all or reply-to:list'
> should be this most-commmon use choice. But currently - this deault is
> in the user's mail-clinet setting. Even if a very few users default to
> 'reply' instead of reply-all' there will be enough indvidual messages
> to annoy us.
>
> In my alternative scheme - 'reply-to:list' is the default [so it takes
> care of the major usage]. In the minor usage where folks need to
> *explicitly* replies to individuals - instead of the list - then folks
> should do *extra work* and use 'forward' [instead of reply/reply-all]
>
> In the case of 'David Sheehan' - he went back to replying to an old
> petsc-dev email even though there were 30 new petsc-maint e-mails on
> the thread. And based on the latest e-mail - he is not aware that he
> is resending messages to petsc-dev and not to petsc-maint. In such
> cases when the user doesn't know where he is sending e-mails, not
> having 'reply-to:list' doesn't help anyway.
>
> Satish
>
> On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Jed Brown wrote:
>
> > This of course is the reason that David Sheehan keeps replying to
> > petsc-dev, despite numerous requests to move it to petsc-maint.
> >
> > The literature on why this is bad is plentiful.
> >
> >   http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
> >
> >   http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html
> >
> > I know many mailers are broken and don't have proper "reply-to-list"
> > functionality.  I know this isn't the first time this has come up, and I
> > understand that turning off the munging might cause more problems than
> > it fixes, but I'd just like to point out the situation.
> >
> > Jed
> >
>
>
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