On Sun, 26 Oct 1997 16:10:50 -0600 (CST),
dattier(_at_)wwa(_dot_)com (David W. Tamkin) wrote:
Era Eriksson had written,
| > | Anyhow, one way or the other, this is obviously something that could
| > | rather easily be decided by some sort of majority vote or whatever.
| > I must disagree. Where to send replies very rarely is something to
| > set one way for all posts to a given list. It should be determined
| > on a response-by-response basis, primarily by the first poster's
| > preference if stated and secondarily by the respondent's decision
| You are addressing this only from the private recipient's point of view.
I don't know how you got that impression. You cut off my next line: "...
and secondarily by the respondent's decision in light of knowing the first
poster's preference." It's a case-by-case determination depending on what
Okay, let me rephrase that: You are not addressing the needs and
preferences of the rest of the list readers.
| A reasonable consensus could, for instance, be to agree to add
| "list-cc" to the subject line of such messages, to make it easier to
| filter them out if you're not interested. (This particular tag is a
| bad choice because it will sound to people like they ought to add it
| to all messages they respond to with a Cc: to the list, when you would
| only want them to so tag stuff that is more or less mundane.)
I must be reading that wrong, Era. If there is a "[list-cc]" tag in the
subject of the copy sent directly to the previous poster, then the carbon
sent to the list will have that tag as well. (Nobody, but nobody, is about
to mail the same text once to the previous poster and separately to the list
to be able use two differing subject lines.) Then *everyone* on the list
will get a copy that says "[list-cc]" and we'll each still have to take a
peek at it to see if it matches something that was a "[list-cc]" for us or
not. Unless I thoroughly misunderstood you, that can work only if the list
software removes the tag from the publicly distributed copy, so that it ap-
pears only on the copy that was delivered directly to the previous poster.
The idea here is to tell the +rest+ of the list that this is posted
not because it is of genuine interest to anyone interested in
Procmail, but just to provide an answer and tell other list readers
what I think it is. If you're lurking on the list only to get new and
revolutionary ideas, or just to keep on top of the list, you will
perhaps want to filter out these messages. This is how I read Alan's
message; he said the S/N ratio is decreasing and too many replies are
just "showing off" and not telling us anything new. Marking list cc:s
as such would allow him to filter out this "noise".
list, but how often does that happen? The doubly addressed responses are
almost always To: the previous poster and Cc: the list (or also Cc: earlier
posters in the thread); in rare cases, they are To: the list and Cc: the
previous poster. If getting two copies annoys a person so much that he or
Cc:ing the list could also be considered a form of "tagging",
formalized or not. I.e. if you think what you have to say is of
broader interest, you put the list in To:. This would likely not even
have to be formalized anywhere, but you might miss the occasional
nugget (say, something that was primarily being discussed on another
list and Cc:ed to Procmail-L for our information) if you blindly
filter on this.
/* era */
--
Paparazzi of the Net: No matter what you do to protect your privacy,
they'll hunt you down and spam you. <http://www.iki.fi/~era/spam/>