On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Keith Moore wrote:
What I don't agree with is the notion that honoring such requests
should happen "by default", i.e. without the recipient being aware of
it and choosing it explicitly.
I am quite happy with the idea of a configuration option for my MUA that
says "enable MTF-handling" (for instance). I am even happy with the
default being "disabled". My MUA already has an option "always honour
Reply-to"; I suspect that if MFT were "standardised" or in some way
"blessed" by the community, an option would be provided. But I really
would like to have SOMETHING that is better than where we are now.
Traditionally, with a meatspace meeting room, you were either inside
the room (and participating in the meeting) or you were not. Along
with the isolation (and privilege) inherent in the physical
arrangement was often some expectation of focus among participants.
Including someone outside the room in a discussion that was going on
inside the room was generally infeasible without special arrangements.
But with email, lists are just multicast addresses, so discussions
routinely involve participants that might not be on the list. And
being "on" a list is not like being "in" a meeting room (in the days
before laptops and WiFi) - for instance you can be "on" a list while
still having far greater demands on your attention that aren't visible
to other list participants.
Sure, but I think most people nowadays understand that. Certainly those
that subscribe to lots of lists do, I'm sure.
Letting the author provide hints about _who_ to reply to might be useful for
other reasons, but expecting recipients to recognize and accommodate senders'
preferences about duplicates and filing cannot scale.
Manually, yes, but why not automatically?
<jest>
How about a Common-Courtesy: header to specify what the sender's
or the list's interpretation of "common courtesy" is?
</jest>
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10(_at_)cus(_dot_)cam(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Cambridge, England. Phone: +44
1223 334714.