** Ian Bell ian@redtommo.com [2003-05-30 08:21]:
On Thursday 29 May 2003 2:08 pm, MJ Ray wrote:
Andrew Savory lists@andrewsavory.com wrote:
How about a little bit of politeness and respect?
Sorry. The message I replied to was a little terse too, not the first time that person had raised this, added nothing new to the topic, and is definitely a FAQ. Is this a better summary for the FAQ maintainer:
You want something new, here is something new. As an experiment I have subscribed at random to three mailing lists hosted by UK Linux User Groups. They host the mailing lists something in the region of 50 UK Linux User Groups.
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.
** end quote [Ian Bell]
The same reason that some people give for using Linux - idealism - or a or a desire to do things the 'right' way.
On one hand you have the safety from embarrassment factor. The automatic thing to do is 'reply', and if you want to reply privately (and make a personal or confidential comment) then you want the 'default' action to be the 'safe' one (reply to sender - one person - not the list). By making the 'dangerous' (as in embarrassing or having potential for leaking private information) action one that is different from the norm you reduce the risk. Mistakenly sending a reply to one person who would have seen it anyway is less of an issue than mistakenly sending to lots of people who wouldn't have otherwise seen the mail.
On the other hand you have the fact of avoiding damaging the content of the original mail. Mail clients have the option to set a reply-to field, so that the default return address is where they want replies to come. Reply-to munging (as used on the other lists) deletes this information, so personal replies will go to the wrong address.
There are other reasons iirc, but those immediately spring to mind.
So the real problem is that most mail clients don't support the RFC that has defined headers to be used by mailing lists so that you have a 'reply to list' option. There in lies the real issue - the solution has been defined, but nobody is busting a gut to implement it.
I may get frustrated when I make the odd mistake, but when you think about it, it does make sense IMHO. Most people use IE for web browsing, but does that make it the best solution, and does it encourage people to write websites well? ;-)