Re: mea máxima culpa

[Carl Peterson]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 2:48 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

Not sure about that.  The information usually is available in the

headers, and as far as I can tell, Gmail does preserve and maintain it
as well.  So unless someone "breaks the chain", it would seem like a
poor choice not to actually use it.

 

It may pass on the headers just fine, but as far as how the information is used for what I see, probably not as much.

>> 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.

Poor choice of user interface then.

Perhaps poor for me personally, but it is likely based on having a minimalist user interface and realizing that most people only "reply" to messages. It also discourages the delightful idiots who insist on replying all to a mass mailing (when the original sender didn't have the decency or know-how to stick the recipient names in the bcc).

 

>> > 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.

Not really.  I was suggesting _adding_ a Reply-To header, but one that
does not go back to the list.

> I am simply stating a preference for the reply-to of both to do so.

As I said, replies from a digest rarely make sense because of breaking
the message threading.

This is a question of whether it makes sense from the human side or the computer side. From the computer side, certainly. However, adding a reply-to target doesn't fix that. If someone's going to reply from the digest, they're going to reply from the digest. It's a question of whether we force them to add the list address to the "to" box.

From the human side, I have no problem understanding the message threading if someone has properly removed the parts of the digest they aren't responding to and have replaced the digest subject line with the one from the actual conversation.