Re: mea máxima culpa

[Carl Peterson]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 2:04 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

I'm certain Gmail will also be able to figure out the mail you are
replying to without referring to any header at all as long as any Gmail
user has not yet deleted it (and probably even afterwards).  But for a
normal mail server/client setup not relying on a universal freely
associating data kraken on the server end, one needs to have information
as specific as a Message Id in order to do reliable queries.

My understanding is that Gmail does not cross reference messages from multiple accounts to figure out threading. I'll also issue a mea culpa of my own. When you mentioned threading, I was not thinking in the sense of a tree. I was only considering the idea of a "conversation," understanding which messages belong together. To my knowledge, Gmail does not attempt to figure out who is replying to whom, but uses a chronological sequencing.

 

> Regarding the actual subject matter, my previously-voiced frustration
> is that the individual messages are *not* set up to reply to the list
> by default.

Don't use "Reply to sender" if you don't want to reply to the sender.

(1) 99% of the time, if I'm replying to a message, I'm intending to reply to the list. Defaults are usually selected to in some way minimize effort, which brings me to (2), I'm lazy. Reply all requires extra mouse-clicks.

 

> As a matter of consistency, I think both the individual
> messages and the digest should reply to the list, or neither.

Do you mean to imply that the digest _does_ add an explicit Reply-To:
header and it goes to the list?  That would indeed be on the less than
sane side.

I have no idea what the digest does or doesn't do. I am replying to your prior statement, "Maybe the reply-to header of the digest should not even point to the list?" As Tim pointed out, the non-digest messages do not and your proposal would be logically consistent with that. I am simply stating a preference for the reply-to of both to do so. I don't see how this is on the less-than-sane side.