On Friday 30 May 2003 5:46 pm, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
snip
You seem to want "reply" to send a message to the list, rather than the author.
Exactly. That's what all the other mail lists that I belong to do.
Reply-To munging, i.e. the list management software inserting a Reply-To field, is the only way a list owner can achieve this behaviour. Obviously individual clients can do their own thing, but that's not what you're asking for.
But:
Firstly, you're asking for mailing list messages to be different from all other kinds of mail messages (and indeed from news messages which aren't quite the same thing but tend to be managed via similar or the same user interfaces); normally "reply" means "reply to just the author" and "followup" means "reply to everyone". You're asking for the "reply" command to have a different meaning depending on which message it applied to.
I am asking for consistency amongst mail groups. I have not burning preference to hit reply rather than reply all. I just want to do the same thing whether I am replying to ALUG or any other mail group. if you can persuade all the others to follow the ALUG way that's fine by me.
Secondly you're asking for your preference to be imposed on all users of the list. Nobody cares if you make your mailer do something special for list mail, but if the change is imposed by the list management software then everyone else is inconvenienced by your personal preferences. This is obviously unreasonable.
It would be unreasonable if that is what I was asking. I have made my preference clear and stated my reasons for it. The only time I asked for ALUG to be changed was qualified by words to the effect 'if the group requested it'. If the majority of the group wants to keep it the way it is then that's fine by me. presumably if the majority of the group wanted it changed that would be fine by you?
Thirdly what you're asking for would be impossible to do correctly even if it was a sensible thing to do - what should the list manager do if there is already a Reply-To field on a message sent to the list?
I do not know, but there are large numbers of mail lists that manage somehow.
I also looked at the mailer set up instructions for new lugmasters on the UK LInux USER Groups web site. There is an option to set the mailer to work the way I prefer or to set it to work the way our group works. So clearly many lugmasters before have faced this question and chosen differently to ALUG.
Yes. Lots of people misconfigure mailing lists. Numerical superiority doesn't make them right.
You are surely not suggesting that if something is 'right' it should be imposed upon the numerical superiority that wants something else?
Ian