Re: [squid-users] Mailing-list admins: can we set up reply-to?

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Matus UHLAR - fantomas
<uhlar_at_fantomas.sk> wrote:
> On 13.11.09 11:44, Brian Mearns wrote:
>> Subject: [squid-users] Mailing-list admins: can we set up reply-to?
>>
>> Would it be possible for the admins of this mailing list to setup the
>> Reply-to header so hitting reply goes back to the mailing list? I
>
> changing reply-to by mailing list is bad.
> http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

Even 7 years ago, I don't think this article was really as relevant as
the author seems to. If you're using Elm, then fantastic, but I
personally have never come across a mail agent that supports "reply to
group". The much more common "reply-all" feature is too often a
detriment to communications and to the network. Unless the mailing
list program is smart enough to detect that someone in the list is
also explicitly given as a recipient and removes that address from the
list of people to whom the message is sent (I would be fairly
surprised and moderately impressed if it did), then reply-all will
cause excess traffic on the network and will end up with the previous
author receiving two copies.

Similarly, just hitting reply will end up with messages not making it
to the list, and therefore completely defeat the purpose of this list,
assuming that, for the most part people probably don't even realize
what they did. If they do realize, then we're basically just back to
the "reply-all" situation: they'll re-send the email to the list,
which means the first send was just a waste of network resources, and
causing the previous author, who already got a copy the from the first
erroneous send, to get a second copy of the same message.

I completely disagree with his model for how people think about these
situations: he seems to think that the default is to send a private
response and if you wanted to reply to the whole list you would know
that this is unusual and take a different action to
do so. That may be true for some lists, but I would argue that the
vast majority of replies sent in response to messages on this list,
and any community-based support list, are not private and are intended
to be read by the whole list. The mental model I use, and that I
contend most people use, is that threads belong to the list, responses
generally go to the list, and if I have a personal message for a
specific author then that action goes against the norm and I will take
special actions to make it happen, which just means copy and paste the
"from" address. Yes, I know there are rare occurrences where somebody
has a different reply-to address than where they sent it from. Again,
I think that's the exception and when that is the case and when that
person expects to get private messages in response, he can simply
include his desired respond-to address in the body of the message,
which shouldn't be a big deal since I really don't think it's very
common.

My biggest issue is simply that setting people up to respond privately
is a real detriment to this list. Answers that are sent to the list,
a) provide an answer for other people who may also have the same
question, including people searching archives in the future, so that
we don't have to keep answering the same question over and over (this
happens enough as it is, but if we support a model where answers don't
even go to the list, it's just going to happen that much more), and b)
allow others to provide feedback and corrections to those answers. Not
everyone here is an expert on squid so even with the best of
intentions it's very possible that someone will give some
exceptionally poor advice: if this gets sent as a private message to
the original poster, there's no opportunity for feedback. At least if
it gets sent to the list there's a good chance that someone will
correct it.

>
>> don't know how many times I've sent responses directly back to the
>> sender because I just started typing the response.
>
> get a mail client that does support mailing lists.

If I was the only one suffering from this problem, I would agree that
the issue is mine to resolve. Based on the three other follow -ups
that have said the same thing, it seems to me to be a pretty common
problem. If there are extensions for popular mail clients out there
that do this, then that's great, but the fact that it comes as an
extension indicates that it is not unusual for mail clients to not
have this feature. It's a great feature to have, I fully agree, but
the fact is most people apparently don't have it, and if that's
causing the quality of the list to degrade, I think it behooves us all
to resolve the issue in the most global way.

>
> --
> Matus UHLAR - fantomas, uhlar@fantomas.sk ; http://www.fantomas.sk/
> Warning: I wish NOT to receive e-mail advertising to this address.
> Varovanie: na tuto adresu chcem NEDOSTAVAT akukolvek reklamnu postu.
> Silvester Stallone: Father of the RISC concept.
>

By the way, what happened with this email? Did you explicitly set the
reply-to header, because it came through as
"reply-to: squid-users_at_squid-cache.org"?

Respectfully,
-Brian

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