Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
- 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.
Although one thing that has to factor into this is whether the person is
on the mailing list at all. I always want personal copies of mail to
lists that I'm not on, for instance.
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.
Of course, part of the problem is that it's obvious to you, but not
obvious to anyone corresponding with you. One could jump to the
conclusion that you do because you send them, but that frequently isn't
the case; there are people who send them and don't want them (usually
people who don't understand mail very well).
I've overridden the default in my mail client for this message so that
you'll get a copy, but I don't currently have any way of configuring this
per-recipient.
I'm not sure whether you're right that personal copies are always a sender
preference. You may be. I can't think of a good counter-argument right
now. (Whether replies should go *only* to the individual or also to the
list is often a list preference, however.)
Incidentally, it's not just a question of single folder vs. multiple
folders. I keep all list traffic in one folder and personal mail in
another folder, and if someone sent the mail to the list, I don't want it
to show up in my personal folder. I therefore encounter two problems:
there is no *good* way to file personal responses into the list folder
because they don't have List-Id headers or other similar filter fodder
(basing it off of the To and Cc lines is unreliable and defeats the whole
purpose of the List-Id header), and even if I do manage to do that, I now
have useless duplicate messages in the list folder.
This is definitely where the personal preference aspect comes in. I can
see why you want your mail to work the way that you do, but I treat
mailing lists equivalently to newsgroups, completely with scoring rules to
score up replies to my own messages, and the personal copies are outside
of that system and don't contribute to it. It's just more mail I have to
delete.
- 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.
Good point. It would indeed be better to deal with that as a separate
issue, since that's where most of the complaints come from that I see.
The quantity of mail is larger if Cc's keep being preserved, so while
people are willing to delete one message, they get annoyed by deleting
multiple messages.
- 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.
In my experience it really is more the latter than the former. Much is
made in this debate of how one side or the other believes what they do
because they don't understand how mail works, but that hasn't been my
experience. Sure, many people aren't sophisticated with all of the
nuances of headers, but my users often want Reply-To set to point to the
mailing list not because they don't understand the problems with that, but
because they do see the problems, consider them unlikely or unimportant,
and care more about getting replies to go to the right place.
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.
That being said, I think any solution to the list reply problem that
doesn't deal with list preference for personal replies, list preference
for replies back to the list, personal preference for copies of list
replies, and personal preference for no copies of list replies, plus still
copying people who aren't on the list, is insufficient to the task.
* 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.
I think this is a pretty significant issue. Even with mailing lists that
are very strongly opposed to personal copies of e-mail, people want to
send personal copies if the person isn't on the list. Admittedly, the
number of lists in the Internet in general that allow one to mail them
without being a member is dropping steadily, but there are many other uses
of mailing-list-like systems (such as role addresses or internal
discussion lists in organizations) that don't have that problem.
and even assuming that list culture has a genuine interest here, how to
deal with the conflict between individual user preference and list
preference?
I would say that individual preference would always override. But then,
I'm a Usenet person. That's what we implemented on Usenet, and it works
pretty well.
For all that mail and news are different, I would argue that the ideal
mailing list semantics are remarkably similar to Usenet, with perhaps some
more configuration on the mailing list side. People on Usenet can request
personal copies of postings with Mail-Copies-To, by default replies go to
the newsgroups, and a poster can indicate that replies should just go to
them personally with Followup-To: poster.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>