I only know a few mailing lists where personal copies are actively
encouraged as part of the culture, and in one of those they're still
supposed to be selective (including only the people who have action items
in the mail being sent).
I'd like to dig down a bit here:
- to me, whether you want personal copies on a reply to a list seems
like a sender preference rather than a list preference. it depends
on how much mail you get, how you process mail, etc. for me, it's
obvious that I do want separate copies, because I have all of my
list mail sent to sub-folders, and I like to arrange things so that
my inbox has a history of all of my correspondence and the replies
to my correspondence, while my list folders are complete archives
of the list. but I can certainly imagine how someone with a single
mail folder would not want to see duplicates.
- a separate issue is whether an address continues to get copied
on subsequent replies. (A sends a message to the list, B
replies with a message To A and CC the list, C replies to B's
message, CC'ing A and the list. A gets CC'ed on subsequent
messages in that thread). *that* might well be a list preference.
- different communities do have different ideas on the best way
to handle these issues. often this is a reflection of
the technical sophistication of each community and the kinds of
tools they tend to use. at other times it's a reflection of
the kinds of conversations those communities want to have.
I don't necessarily think it's useful or appropriate for technical
standards to accommodate everybody's different ways of dealing with a
problem. I think the technical standards need to define a small number of
ways to deal with the problem (ideally one way) and try to make sure that
that way will work for the diverse sets of users out there.
FWIW: A nearly sure-fire way to get an argument started about how replies
should work is to send a provocative message to a large and diverse
list of recipients. Somebody is certain to reply, and it's likely
someone will reply to that. Sooner or later someone else will get
annoyed at being cc'ed on the replies, and complain about it - often
suggesting that someone else _should_ have set reply-to, trimmed the
cc list, bcc'ed other recipients, or simply not replied at all.
There are more pieces missing than just a header like MFT, I think. At
the least, I think we need some way of representing the following:
* Is the user a member of the mailing list to which they sent the mail?
MFT lets the user express this indirectly by answering the related but
not identical question "do you want copies of responses on the list,"
I see the questions as orthogonal. But I imagine it could help a
recipient decide whether to trim a particular address from a
Cc list.
* Should replies to list postings *generally* go only to the list or to
the list and the user, as a matter of list culture?
or for that matter, just to the user.
and even assuming that list culture has a genuine interest here, how
to deal with the conflict between individual user preference and
list preference?
Keith