[petsc-users] Mailing list reply-to munging (was Any changes in ML usage between 3.1-p8 -> 3.3-p6?)

[Jed Brown]

Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Jozsef Bakosi wrote:
>
>> Can you guys please CC jbakosi at lanl.gov? Thanks, J
>
> Mailing lists are setup that way. The default is: subscribe to
> participate, and reply-to: list. So cc:ing automatically doesn't work.

If everyone used mailers that did group replies correctly, then we would
always preserve Cc's in list discussions and the list would not munge
the Reply-to header.  Then people could subscribe and turn off list
mail, or they could filter all mail to the list that didn't directly Cc
them.  This is a great way to manage high-volume mailing lists.  You can
even allow anonymous posting to the mailing list, which is what the Git
list and many other open source/technical lists do.

This is ruined by munging Reply-to because many/most mailers drop the
>From address in a group-reply when Reply-to is set.

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

  http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html

The problem is that an awful lot of mailers/users don't automatically do
group replies to mailing list messages, causing the list Cc to be
dropped.  We have this problem with petsc-maint in that several emails
per day are reminding people to keep petsc-maint Cc'd in the reply.

Personally, I would rather turn off Reply-to munging and use a canned
reply instructing users to resend their email to the list with all Cc's
included (i.e., use "reply-all" when replying to the list).  Almost all
mailers can be configured to make this the default.

I think this change would cause more people to ask questions on the
mailing list where it becomes searchable than on petsc-maint where the
reply helps only one person.


Satish argued the other way when we discussed this a few years ago:

http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/2010-March/002489.html