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

[Satish Balay]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Jed Brown wrote:

> 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

Yes - and I still stand by that argument. Its best to otimize for
'majority usage' pattern.

I know you deal with personal replies for petsc-maint stuff. But I set
up my mailer to automatically set Reply-to:petsc-maint for all
petsc-maint traffic [and modify it manually for the 1% usage case
where thats not appropriate]

And wrt anonymous posts [without subscribing] - that was a receipie
for spam.  [however good the spam filters are] - so you'll have to
account for that crap aswell. We get plenty of that on petsc-maint -
but now with petsc-users mailing list - that spam gets distributed to
all list subscribers.

Satish