This is something I've been meaning to post about ever since seeing Eli's
and Sean's signatures. This post expresses my opinion on the subject, and
I am not under the delusion that I'll change anyone else's mind.
When Roderick Schertler said to Sean Straw:
| >If you don't like getting duplicates why not just fix the problem for
| >yourself? Drop duplicates on your end and they will never bother you
| >again.
philo(_at_)radix(_dot_)net responded,
| Isn't this the argument usually used by spammers? If you don't like it-
| just delete it. Meanwhile, the spam still takes up bandwidth.
I find Philo's comparison very, very unapt.
There is no similarity between sending someone a response to his or her own
words (as when you answer a mailing list post by writing to the author and
carboning the list) and loading down the transports with spam to legions who
never broached the subject just because you know their addresses.
The latter is thousands of copies of something about which the recipients
have never said they cared. The former is one copy to a person who has
already expressed some interest in the topic. I'll trust that Sean and Eli
are motivated by a desire to save a tiny bit of bandwidth use, but they come
off sounding as if they viewed it as an insult ("I think you will not under-
stand this if you read it only once"), whereas it is actually a courtesy
("You shouldn't have to wait for the mailing list's turnaround time before
you get this nor have to go through everything else the mailing list carries
to see a reply to your own post") and, as I'll explain below, overriding it
is a nuisance for the respondent, but a recipient can automate the results
that Eli and Sean want.
It should also be noted that their .sigs actually say not to carbon them if
you write to the list. What actually is sent is a response to the previous
author; it is the list that gets the carbon. One could argue that techni-
cally group-replying is not counter to their wishes.
When a mailing list does not (and usually should not) force replies to the
list, many MUA's give a choice of responding (1) only to the author or (2) to
the author with a carbon to the list. To write only to the list requires (a)
taking the author's address out of To: and (b) putting the list's address
into To:. Sean and Eli speak as if it the reply defaulted solely to the
list and as if the respondent were taking the trouble to add a carbon to the
author (they ask you not to cc them; they don't ask you to cancel the copy to
them that would be sent by default); then they demand that you omit that step.
But it is not an extra step to send it (it's two extra steps to prevent it);
it is a courtesy, not an insult; the practice is common convention; and when
one wants one's mail to be different from the standard, it is one's own re-
sponsibility to alter it locally (that's what procmail rcfiles are FOR), not
that of the rest of the net to pretailor it for someone who personally disa-
grees. So I'm with Roderick; if you want only the list copy, the solution is
something like this:
:0h
* ^TO_procmail
* !^Resent-Sender: procmail
/dev/null