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 is. But that's not what I was presuming.
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".
Nope. I was saying "I can't assume that the recipient will see the
message if I only send it to the list, and it's important that this
recipient see the message (if only because it's impolite to not copy
him). Therefore I will explicitly specify this recipient (a) to make
sure he gets a copy and (b) to notify other recipients that I
sent him a copy.
What I presume is that if I reply to a message that someone sent, it's
simple
courtesy to ensure that he reliably gets a copy of the reply. It's also
simple courtesy to explicitly notify other recipients of the message that
the
author of the subject message was sent a copy of the reply - so that they
know
he was not snubbed.
And unfortunately it seems that your courtesy is different from several
others'. That's the problem with culture.
Well, there's a conflict between what is dictated by courtesy and what the
technology provides. In particular, we don't tend to have message stores
or user agents that manage duplicate messages in a useful way.
What's the solution? I can see
none other than providing sufficient switches/knobs in the software so
that people can configure it to suit themselves.
I can imagine solutions that seem much better than that. But I'll probably
have to build them in order to make a convincing demonstration.
Keith