[mythtv-users] Replying to mailing lists

Nick Rout nick.rout at gmail.com
Tue Nov 12 04:00:08 UTC 2013


On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Joseph Fry <joe at thefrys.com> wrote:
>>> The real problem, of course, is that almost *no* email clients understand
>>> mailing lists; when replying to a mailing list, you address your reply to
>>> the incoming email's "To" header, rather than the more common "From"
>>> header.
>>
>> ...
>>>
>>> Smarter lists will use RFC 2919 compliant headers to tell mail user agents
>>> to perform special handling, but -- again -- MUAs smart enough to know
>>> what to do about them are thin on the ground.
>>
>>
>> Smarter lists also use the Reply-To header which makes it easy to
>> provide a good default. :)
>
> Thats called reply-to munging, and is actually not compliant (violates
> RFC 2822)... though I prefer it as well as all the lists I use are
> much more focused on public discussion.  I rarely send off-list
> messages to folks on the list.
>
> see http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html and
> any other of a million discussions on the topic.  While it's still
> widely done, and most email providers/clients work just fine, it is a
> standards violation and therefore can potentially cause problems with
> services/clients that follow the RFC.
>
> The greatest concern is for those that participate in several email
> lists using a decent mail reader.  On many lists, off list discussions
> are the norm, and thus the reply-to-sender (rfc compliant) as default
> is valuable.  If your lists are a mix of reply-to-sender and
> reply-to-list, you WILL eventually accidentally reply to an individual
> when you intended it for the list, or worse, send an email to a list
> when it was intended for an individual (often one that can cause
> embarrassment or worse).

On a list about open source software (or indeed any list where the
information purveyed is likely to help more than just the immediate
participants) I find 'off list' discussions particularly galling. The
number of discussions I have seen about windows drivers that go off
list and we never see the answer!


> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://www.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list