[amsat-bb] Re: Email etiquette - was Re: Re: Moon

[Jonathan Guthrie]

The last time I set up a mailing list, the list manager was insistent 
that I did not want to set the "reply-to" address to the list address, 
noting that doing that removed any "reply-to" field that the sender put 
in there, which was a loss of important data for those users who put 
data in that header field.  It also pointed out that it made private 
messages harder to do, and gave it a nonzero probability that you would 
respond to the group when you intended to respond to the individual. 
The configuration pages linked to a newsgroup post somewhere of someone 
ranting about the practice and proving that it was the wrong thing to do.

Nevertheless, I selected that option and I will do it again.  Because 
unless you choose that option, the most efficient way for me to reply to 
the group is to do a reply all.  (Well, it was.  This new version of 
Thunderbird has a "reply to group" option.  Woot!) At that point, I have 
to trim the recipient list in order to send it only to the group, which 
is almost always what I'm trying to do.  It's a pain, so most of the 
time I don't bother.

Since most responses to list messages are intended for the list and not 
to the individual who wrote the message you're responding to, not 
abusing "reply-to" in that fashion deoptimizes the typical case in order 
to be technically correct.  That is, in my opinion, a dumb thing to do 
in order to preserve the information in the rarely-used reply-to field.

I mention this because this list is set up in the technically correct 
way, and I have several times sent messages to individuals when I 
intended them to go to the list.  That is MY particular annoyance.

On 04/14/2010 07:54 AM, Nigel Gunn G8IFF/W8IFF wrote:
> Only 4 lines of sig. The 2 dashes are the delimiter put in by the e-mail client.
> Could be worse. I could put the sig at the top!
> Also bugs me when people dont crop the recipient list.
>
>
> On 14-Apr-10 04:39, Steve Meuse wrote:
>> Nigel Gunn G8IFF/W8IFF expunged (nigel at ngunn.net):
>>
>>> Top posting is the better option.
>>
>> My favorite annoyance are people who post 1 line of text but have 5 lines of a .sig :)
>
>


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