Bug in mailing lists; unfriendly to non-subscribers

Tom H tomh0665 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 5 19:29:44 UTC 2010


On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Felipe Contreras
<felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Felipe Contreras
>> <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Is it so much to ask for you to hit "reply to all" instead of "reply"
>>> (depending on the case), so that other people can have the benefits of
>>> non-munged headers?
>>
>> On debian-user, hitting reply sends an email back to the poster and
>> there are two regular complaints.
>>
>> 1. Many people hit "reply" and don't send a reply to the list - and
>> the recipient then forwards the unintended private email back to the
>> list.
>
> That's a user problem. If you send an unintended private mail, you ask
> the recipient to ignore it, and then send the right one to the mailing
> list.
>
> Just like with top-posting, they should enforce against the behavior
> they don't want.
>
> The problem is not in the system.

The sender has to realise that he/she has sent a private email! LOL

It is much less problematic for "reply" to reply to the list,
especially if changing that behavior is solely meant to help those who
don't want to subscribe to it...


>> 2. Many people hit "reply all" and the person they are replying to
>> complains that he/she has received two emails.
>
> That's because either they are stupid or their system is stupid, and
> their MUA is not right.
>
> In Feodra's case mailman is used, which has the option:
> "Avoid duplicate copies of messages?"

When someone sends an email to a person and to debian-user and that
person is subscribed to debian-user, two emails are received, one of
which does not go through the list server so its settings don't come
into play.


> You seem to have it on by default. Problem solved.

I think that you mean "the people who complain have it on by default"
because I have never received duplicate emails, nor complained about
them.


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