At 15:31 29/09/2004, Keith Moore wrote:
Which is exactly the opposite of what some other people consider to be
common courtesy. Many people feel that common courtesy dictates that you
SHOULD trim down the To/Cc recipients to just the list name.
here's the difference:
The courtesy I'm referring to is ensuring that the author of a message
gets a copy of the reply, and ensuring that other participants in the
discussion are aware that the author was sent a copy of the reply. The
only way to do this reliably is to explicitly specify the author of the
subject message as one of the reply recipients.
The courtesy other people see as common is in ridding a recipient of the
need to see multiple copies of a message. That's a valid concern, but it
is presumptuous to assume that a recipient is on the list, and that the
recipient reads the list traffic in the same way that he reads other traffic.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if someone sent a message to
the list, that they are on the list!
I agree that the author of the message should get a reply - but given the
reasonable assumption that if someone is participating in a discussion in a
mailing list, they are probably receiving messages from the list, replying
to the list alone should be sufficient. I DON'T agree that other
participants in the discussion need to be made explicitly aware that the
author was sent a copy of the reply - for the same reason; it is not
unreasonable for them to assume that the original author is on the list, so
a message to the list will get back to the original author.
As you may have seen from other responses to you, _your_ idea of 'common
courtesy' isn't the same as quite a few other people, so flaming someone
because they did what THEY saw as common courtesy is definitely not
courteous. The PROPER way for you to express your opinion would have been
along the lines of "I don't read mail to the list as quickly as mail sent
directly to me, so I'd prefer it if you Cc'd your replies to me as well".
Flaming was totally undeserved.
Paul VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
support(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk http://www.pscs.co.uk/