On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 11:44:21AM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
Now if recipients had suitable MUAs we could define ways by which
senders could provide hints to recipients about what the senders think
is the "right thing", and the MUAs could make it easy to comply with
the sender's wish if the recipient chose to do so. But as soon as
recipients' MUAs try to use those hints to automate decisions that need
to be explicitly made by the recipient _on a per-message basis_ when
composing a reply, we will have a worse mess than we have now.
I see your points, Keith, but I think it is in practice not feasible.
I don't want to look every time at who the receivers will be.
If at all possible I want to have my MUA do the right thing for me.
Generally I think there are 3 possible reply types I want to do:
1. reply-to-all - reply to all receivers of the original message,
that is - the people and lists on the To: and Cc: headers, plus the
sender in the From: header . The reply-to-all would be a good
candidate for a general reply commend, as it also would be fine
for an individual reply - except that I don't want to get a copy of my
own reply in my inbox - which would be an easy thing to avoid for a MUA.
2. reply-to-sender - reply to the From: header address
This is a special case when I know that I only want the author of the
original message to see my answer.
3. Reply-to-list - this is when I do not want to reply to the sender
or people on the cc: list. This is not the general discussion list
response, but a special usage case e.g. when a group gets a message from
an outsider, and want to discuss a potential answer to the outsider
amongst themselves before releasing the agreed answer.
On top of that it should always be easy to modify the default receivers,
add new receivers etc.
Then for eliminating duplicate mail:
1. I think the best way is just to have the MUA not display the
diplicate mail, if that is what the user wants. I think the extra
traffic and the extra diskspace needed is negliable. Anyway the
MUA could delete duplicate mail too.
2. Another way could be for the list exploder software to recognize
that a member of the list is also in the To: or Cc: fields,
I think this test is commony already done for the From: field. (metoo)
in MTA's. just an idea. Maybe some people really want to get two copies.
If so, preferences could be set in the list exploder's membership
lists.
Just my 2 eurocent.
best regards
keld