Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
well, I'm not sure if I found the message that explains _why_ you don't
want to see them, but I did find a message that explains that you want
replies to list mail to end up in a list folder and not in your inbox.
I can expand a little bit; I'm not sure how much I said before.
I think of mail folders a little bit like newsgroups, in the sense that my
mail folders are not only a convenient way of sorting topics together, but
also acquire different priorities, invoke different quantities of guilt if
messages sit unresponded-to, and are read at different times and to
different degrees.
A conversation like this, for example, I want to live entirely in the
mailing list folder because talking about how to implement things with
mail is not part of my job or one of my primary hobbies. I'm currently
interested in this discussion, so I'm reading this folder regularly, but
at some other time when I don't feel like thinking about mail, I may leave
this folder to sit fallow or even delete its contents unread since I'm
busy with other things. There are a different set of folders for work
that I read every day during the weekdays, but may not read at all on the
weekends or while I'm on vacation. And personal e-mail I read at a very
high priority and feel guilty when I've received mail that I've not yet
responded to.
When someone copies me on a reply to routine list mail, such as this
discussion, they are in essence forcing a higher priority on their message
than it deserves. Now, this isn't their fault per se; I don't expect them
to be psychic and understand how I use mail and how I prioritize it. But
I would like to keep that from being the common reply method in mail
clients so that I don't have to keep manually correcting the
misprioritization (by reading the message, observing it was cc'd to the
mailing list and therefore not the beginning of private correspondance,
and deleting the stray, misfiled copy).
If I'm having one of these conversations, and I decide I'm tired of the
topic, don't have the time to talk about it any more, and want to stop,
the traffic should cease completely when I unsubscribe from the list.
When I'm being cc'd, I can continue to get e-mail for quite some time (and
even about different topics than the original one) when I no longer care
at all.
Plus, I notice that even though I am consciously aware of things like
this, and can manually correct, this method of handling e-mail makes so
much intuitive sense to me that I find myself reacting to it without even
meaning to. For example, I'm replying to this message immediately in part
because you sent me a private copy and I checked mail before going home; I
wasn't intending to, and wouldn't have, replied to any other routine list
e-mail, and didn't realize I was doing that until I was already partway
through the message. This isn't a huge deal (if it were, I would have
exercised more self-control), but it can be annoying (not that it's at all
your fault, other than that you use a reply method that I think is
substantially less than ideal).
Now, one solution to this is, of course, to abandon all of the advances
that have been made in mail sorting and sort mail by To and Cc header
contents instead of by the older (Sender, Return-Path) or newer and
standardized (List-Id) headers designed for that purpose. Then I'd just
end up with two copies of the same message in one folder, still annoying
but something that my MUA can actually deal with automatically. However,
I would contend that this is *also* broken for all of the same reasons
that List-Id was invented in the first place. It breaks for mailing lists
that have multiple submission addresses (particularly ones with multiple
and constantly changing submission addresses, like mailing lists that are
actually the recipients of mail to per-ticket addresses for a trouble
ticketing system, for instance), it breaks when the message is Bcc'd to
the mailing list, and the To and Cc addresses often change faster than the
List-Id header.
Overall, I don't like the current situation at all. I either end up with
fairly routine misprioritized e-mail that feels like it's "intruding" into
a space where it doesn't belong, or I have to take a couple of giant steps
backwards into the dark days of mail filtering and write rules to match
To/Cc headers for all mailing lists (in addition to the List-Id rules,
since I still want to catch those Bccs and changing list submission
addresses) and still have occasional misses. I don't think it's possible
to solve this entirely at the receiving MUA without any changes on the
part of the senders.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>