[OT] Mailing Lists and Reply All (Was: Selecting Text)

[Christian Roth]

Cortland Haws Klein wrote:

>Get into the habit of using Reply All.

Please don't. I consider using "Reply All" rude regarding the original
poster, as he gets two copies of any reply. There are mail clients that
make it extremely difficult to delete specific duplicates of a message (I
think Mail is one of them), so the recipient has to sort out manually the
list mail (he wants to keep) from the private mail he automatically gets
due to your using the Reply All feature for your own convenience.

If a list is setup to not use the Reply-To header, it's the user's task
to consciously edit the recipients list so that responses either only go
to the list (when staying on-topic and to let other readers know any
solutions to a problem), or only to the original sender (when it's not
relevant to the list and as an indicator to take this thread private).
That's simply the price you pay for getting the benefits of not munging
Reply-To: edit the list of recipients of most any of your outgoing
messages (to not include the private duplicate).

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


Regards, Christian