Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
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.
As another view, I also have many folders for mailing lists, but I
generally don't want to receive duplicates of replies in personal
mail. My reasoning is that things discussed in public on mailing
lists have no business in my private inbox. Having copies of all
discussions I've participated on mailing lists in my private inbox
would make it more difficult to find real personal mail.
This just show that even users with presumably large amounts of
e-mail, and many folders, don't agree on how to organize their mail.
Which I guess is what you should expect, but I'm not sure it has been
all that clear.
So I agree that receiving copies of mailing list discussions is a
sender preference, but it seems it is not easy to categorize senders
to know what their preferences are. I mean, here we have two
presumably "power users" that don't agree on whether they want copies
or not. I don't know what kind of (useful) categories one would have
to define in order to separate our two preferences. Perhaps it is not
useful to think of the preference decision as being related to any
kind of user category, at all.
Thanks,
Simon