Annoying Reply-To

On 17/10/2008, at 12.24, Tomasz Ostrowski wrote:

> On 2008-10-17 12:13, Mikkel Høgh wrote:
>
>>> You're supposed to use "Reply to all" if you want to reply to the
>>> list.
>>
>> Well, I think the most common use case for a mailing list is to reply
>> back to the list, isn't that the whole point?
>
> It is a point of having "Reply to all" button. With "reply-to" is it
> hard to reply to one person, easy to reply to the list. Without it
> it is
> both easy.

But again, how often do you want to give a personal reply only? That
is a valid use-case, but I'd say amongst the hundreds of mailing-list
replies I've written over the years, only two or three were not sent
back to the mailing list.

>
>> Personally I find it annoying that I get two copies of each reply to
>> one of my posts, one that is filtered into the mailinglist folder
>> because it has the correct X-Mailing-List header and the other just
>> sits there in my inbox, wasting both bandwidth and disk space in the
>> process.
>
> So set reply-to in messages you send by yourself - it will be honored.

Yay, even more manual labour instead of having the computers doing the
work for us. What's your next suggestion, go back to pen and paper?

>
>
>> Besides, the if the Reply-To thing is so dangerous, why do most other
>> mailing lists do it?
>
> for i in Windows MySQL IE Sweets Alcohol etc.; do
>     echo "If using $i is so dangerous, why do most do it?"
> done


Well, my point is that Reply-To: is only dangerous if you're not
careful. Not so with the other examples you mention :)

If you're writing something important, private and/or confidential,
don't you always check before you send? You'd better, because a small
typo when you selected the recipient might mean that you're sending
love-letters to your boss or something like that :)