Ian Bell ian@redtommo.com writes:
Richard Kettlewell wrote:
Ian Bell ian@redtommo.com writes:
All three of the groups I subscribed to behaved the way I would expect. Messages appear as From: 'Author' To: mailgroup. Pressing reply sends a message to the group as expected. If I want to reply just to the author I just click on his/her email address. I strongly suspect that all the mail groups hosted by the UK Linux User Groups site behave this way, It is clearly good enough and problem free enough for many other LUGs to have it set up this way. It is clearly the way users expect it to be. I see no compelling reason why our mailing list should be different.
The fact that lots of people do something does not imply it is "problem-free".
Indeed not and I did not make that implication. However Linux users are a vociferous lot and if there were significant problems with it I am sure we would have heard about it.
People complain about Reply-To munging all the time. There are a number of web pages on the subject.
Answer me this: what do you think Reply-To munging should do to a message that already has a Reply-To field?
I have no idea. I do not even understand the question What I do know is that I belong to about 20 mail groups of one kind or another, hosted on various sites. Except for ALUG they all work the way I would expect. Not once have I ever had a problem with any of them. Not once has anyone on any group (except ALUG) complained about the way the mailer works or has had a problem with it.
You seem to want "reply" to send a message to the list, rather than the author.
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.
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.
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 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.