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Jerry Feldman wrote: | We have had this discussion at least for 6 years or more. Listservs can be | set up either to set the list up with a reply-to back to the list, or the | reply back to the original sender. In the past, the concensus has favored | setting the reply-to back to the original message sender. I might also add | that the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group list is set up the same way. | Mark Caron wrote: | > Why is the BLU discuss list setup up this way? I can't remember a list that | > I have been on in the past that didn't have the reply-to set to the list by | > default. | -- What I've seen is that most technical mailing lists are set up to reply only to the sender, while most other lists are set up to reply to the list. But there are exceptions to the latter. I'm on one folk music list whose admin keeps it set to "reply to sender" because this causes the fewest headaches for her. With most mailing list software, "reply to list" often has the effect of sending two copies of messages a lot of the time. There's nothing that the list admin can do about this, because it's done by the end-user's email software and the list software doesn't see the second copy. But the admin then has to deal with the constant email about a "bug" that causes people to get two copies of messages. One of the real problems with "reply to list" is that it usually means ignoring the sender's explicit instructions, and you often can't reply to the sender even if you want to. I've seen any number of messages on such lists that don't contain the sender's email address anywhere. I've also been frustrated by typing an explicit "Reply-to:" line directing replies back to me, and seeing that the list software not only ignores this, but strips my email address out of the headers sent to the list. If I forget to append my .signature file and my email package decides to not include it, there is then no way that the recipients can reply to me, even though that was what I explicitly requested. The email package I'm using now (mh) does the nice thing of building headers that show all the email addresses that it finds in the headers, as To: or Cc: lines, so I can edit them fairly easily. It also invokes $EDITOR to edit the message, so I can see all the headers, but many GUI mail packages hide the headers from the users, and they don't know what is boing out or where the mail is being sent. But if the list software suppresses the sender's address, there's not a whole lot that even mh can do to fix the problem. Anyhow, I'll vote (again) to keep the list as it is. -- Modern GUIs are very well designed, for people with three hands. The real problem has been how slow customers have been to make necessary hardware upgrades to meet the requirements of the software. - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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