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Re: OT: General phylosophical thoughts about mailing lists behaviours
On Tue, Oct 03, 2000, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "OT: General phylosophical thoughts about mailing lists behaviours":
> For some strange reason, everytime I respond to a thread, I get all
> further communication on that thread twice.
>
> People, please, don't blindly "reply to all" messages. It stands to
> reason that, if someone posted to this mailing list, this someone is
> also subscribed to it. It is therefor enough to reply to the mailing
> list.
Shachar, sorry for not following your advice, and still sending this reply
to you directly, as well as the list ;)
I guess that some people send a CC to the original person on purpose, wanting
them to see the message more quickly (e.g., when people subscribe to a
digest or forward the mailing-list mail to some folder).
However, the reason I send this message to you too is a much more mundane
reason - an issue I've raised here before but never got solved to my
satisfaction. Unlike many other mailing-lists (including all the lists I
run), in linux-il when you "Reply" to a message (using the normal "r"
command in mutt or elm, for example) your email get sent to the person
writing the message, not to the list [*]. When you hit "g" (group reply)
you send an email to the person writing the original mail, with CC to the
list (which appeared in the To: of the original message). So because this
is the only convenient method for me to reply to a posting [**], I always use
"g" this way, and the people I respond to always get the message directly,
in addition to the mailing list. I bet many other people do this for the
same reason.
[*] I think that this reply-to-person default is evil in other ways, not
just the extra-CC phenomenon. It also encourages people to reply to people
directly rather than the list, and other people of the list don't get to
enjoy (hopefully) the answers. In my opinion personal communications between
list members are ok, but like you're taught as children: "lo menumas lehistoded
bechevra", meaning that people don't like knowing that there's interesting
conversation going on behind their back, and that they are missing the
"action".
Of course this doesn't mean that people should reply with "me too" to every
message on the list, or with "I prefer debian/mandrake/slackware/TrustedBSD/
VMS" to every Redhat-related message. People should still practice some
restraint.
[**] before people start telling me to RTFM - yes, I know. I've read the entire
muttrc manual, and it has the 'lists' and 'subscribe' configuration commands
to deal with replying to mailing lists. However, I find these very inconvenient
(e.g., they also change the way the message is displayed) so I prefer not
to use them.
--
Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Oct 3 2000, 4 Tishri 5761
nyh@math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |I want to be a human being, not a human
http://nadav.harel.org.il |doing -- Scatman John
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