On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 05:14:45PM +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
Er, you wrote this: "it is presumptuous to assume ... that the recipient
reads the list traffic in the same way that he reads other traffic."
My point is that it is equally presumptious to assume the opposite. It
seemed to me that you were saying "I can't assume the recipient will
read list traffic like other traffic, therefore I will send him some
other traffic, _presuming_ that he will read other traffic more
quickly". Apologies if I misinterpreted what you were saying. (And I
pointed out that I, for one, will _not_ read your other traffic to me
any faster than I will the list posting.)
I think it is clear that there are several netiquettes here, and it
seems like some people are very opiniated on this. I am administrating a
number of email lists, and just yesterday one participant left one list
because I do not employ reply-to headers for the list, and another
stopped working because receiving two copies of responses to his mail
was destroying his work happiness (it annoyed him tremendously).
I think we need some guidance on how to handle lists. That is, some best
practice RFC or some RFC on which headers to employ and how.
This should include
1. various scenarios of email list usage:
closed, open with whitelist and moderator, open with moderator, open with
a news gateway, and more. Different header use may apply to differnt usages.
2. different scenarios of user behaviour and perferences,
some prefer to have two copies, some prefer to have just one copy.
Some may want to sort it in folders, other have just one big inbox,
others have a separate inbox that they do not want list mail in.
We cannot do everything, but a number of common scenarios should be
investigated.
3. recommendations to MUA handling
which commands to offer in the MUA: sender-reply, group-reply,
reply to list, maybe reply to everybody except sender .
Maybe a recommendation to MUAs on how to handle duplicate mail, maybe
they should only show one instance of it. How folders may be handled
with the new functionality we propose. There could be both
considerations for sending MUAs and receiving MUAs.
4. recommendations for list exploders
Which headers to set for each different list type, maybe some per-user
settings of preferences.
Some similarities with news could also be pondered upon, and what to
learn from that.
Best regards
Keld