Re: Gnome Mailing List

[Florian Hars <fm5a014 math uni-hamburg de>]

On Wed, 21 Jan 1998, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> yes, but the gnome lists right now are more technical oriented and
> thus the average posting population of this list knows how to use
> their mailer. 

Yes, but the old behaviour forced you to edit the headers of replies in
every case, no matter if you wanted to reply to the list or to the author
alone. Most people didn't do this, and the To: and Cc: fields got filled
with useless addresses, and you got all replies to your messages twice
(and the replies to the replies, too).  The new behaviour does not force
you to do this in the standard case that you want to continue the public
discussion in the public forum.

The old behaviour was *REALLY* ANNOYING*.

Another point: For a mailing list there is no well defined distinction
between a follwup and a reply, since there ist no reliable way to
distinguish which address in the To: and Cc: fields is a mailing list and
which is not, and what the meaning of "Follow-up" is if there is a
personal address in the To: and two lists in the Cc:. Any software that
makes this distinction is prone to be broken, and the only reasonable way
to handle this is to set the reply-to to the list. This also allows you to
easily choose if you want to answer to the list or the author, since you
only have to say yes or no if your mailer asks you if it should obey the
Reply-To, no  mucking around with header lines.

-Florian.