:: Re: [DNG] Devuan AMI
Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Rick Moen
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] Devuan AMI
Quoting Antony Stone (Antony.Stone@???):

> I have no problem with that.
>
> The unfortunate side-effect is that anyone receiving this list email
> and using a simple "reply" ends up not replying to the list, which I
> consider to be very bad manners.


{groan} Not correct. And we unfortunately are edging perilously close
to the Flamewar That Shall Not Be Named.

There is no such thing as a simple 'reply', though rather a lot of
MUAs[1] , perhaps a majority, use that unfortunate name for one of their
(typically) two reply modes.

RFC-complaint MUAs uniformly have two reply modes, Reply-Sender and
Reply-All. Reply-Sender, as I mentioned separately, exists explicitly
to generate a direct reply to the one party who was the previous sender.
Reply-All exists explicitly to generate a reply to each and every one of
the antecedent addresses in the To and Cc headers.

What you are calling 'simple "reply"', I am 99.99% certain, is
Reply-Sender. You are complaining that it generates a direct reply.
This is (I mean no offence) an error on your part: Direct replying is
what that reply mode is _supposed to do_.

And it's supposed to do that irrespective of whether the user has
supplied an alternate, requested address in the user-optional Reply-To
header. That. Is. What. Reply-Sender. Does.

The standard way of doing group replying is and should always be the
_other_ reply mode, Reply-All. People should do that. Seriously.
Finally. No kidding. And stop behaving as if so-called 'reply'
(Reply-Sender) ought to, or should be forced to.

And, about that...

The Flamewar That Shall Not Be Named is all about, um, let's try to be
polite, underinformed and technology-light people who've bought into the
notion that, through a controversial method called 'munging', the
so-called 'reply' mode can be forced to automagically always Do The
Right Thing. Until 2001, the IETF had not made a dispositive statement
about whether that controversial perversion of mail ('munging' of the
Reply-To header inside MLM[1] software) was legitimate or not. In 2001,
the matter was decided. No. Not OK.

Everyone who saw newsgroups and mailing lists turn into endless arguing
between technical people and neophytes got _really_ tired of hearing yet
another round of the argument, and so it was nice when IETF settled the
matter almost two decades ago. But of course, this is the Internet,
where no horse is so dead that _somebody_ won't want to unbury it and
flog it some more.

I'm not going to be that guy. After 2001, I FAQed it. And that's all
I'm going to say about that.

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/netiquette.html#replyto


[1] Mailing List Manager, i.e., software like GNU Mailman, Sympa,
majordomo, etc.


> > To illustrate the legitmate use-case, consider my recent situation when
> > I knew I would be about a small ship for a while, hence having irregular
> > if any Internet access. In that case, I might wish to signal in
> > outgoing mail an alternate direct-reply address where I might use
> > webmail.
>
> This is all very well from a personal point of view, but such actions deprive
> all other list subscribers (and the archives) from the potential benefit of the
> reply (and any further discussions which might take place), therefore I
> consider the onus to be on the person submitting the question to a list to
> ensure that they can receive the reply from the list, rather than expecting
> (or indeed trying to entice) the responder to reply to them personally and
> only personally.
>
> If the Reply-To supported "reply to me personally and also to the list" then I
> wouldn't mind in the slightest, but if someone sends a question to the list
> and essentially asks that the replies be *only* them personally, then I simply
> consider that to be poor list behaviour.
>
>
> Antony.
>
> --
> I want to build a machine that will be proud of me.
>
> - Danny Hillis, creator of The Connection Machine
>
>                                                    Please reply to the list;
>                                                          please *don't* CC me.
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng