[TIP] list mechanics

[Titus Brown]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 12:27:13AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
-> Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> writes:
-> 
-> > Ben Finney wrote:
-> > > [Please don't send me copies of messages posted to the list. I
-> > > participate here via a non-mail interface, and it's annoying to
-> > > get the messages appearing duplicated in email.]
-> > 
-> > This list is setup so that in most mail clients it requires a
-> > 'reply-all' to keep the reply on the list. I've manually removed
-> > your address this time but make no promises about the future.
-> 
-> Instead of "reply all", the only address you need to reply to is the
-> list address. Your email client has all the information it needs to do
-> this for you: the header of every message from the list has a standard
-> 'List-Post' <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt> field.
-> 
-> If your email client isn't handling internet standards published
-> almost ten years ago, you might want to have a word with the vendor of
-> that software and ask them to fix that.

Hi, Ben,

while I appreciate the educational response ;), there is no way for
mailer software to know whether or not you are a member of the list.
Thus it cannot eliminate your address from the response.  mutt, my
mailer software, which is generally standards compliant, does indeed
insist on adding your name on a 'group-reply' for this reason.  It comes
in handy when non-subscribers post questions...

More generally, this isn't an "internet standard" AFAICT.  This link

	http://www.metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.mhtml

does give some good reasons to go with a Reply-To header set to the
list.  However, my lists explicitly don't have reply-to-list set,
because I find that doing that results in an annoyingly high rate of
private person-to-person messages being sent to the list.  Were the
reply-to set, and I wanted to reply directly to you and NOT to the list,
I would have to go through extra steps.

Finally, note that python-dev is set up in exactly the same way, and has
the same sender-duplication problem that you complain about above.  If
you can convince them to change their config, then I'll consider changing :)

--titus