[antlr-interest] OT: Mailing List Configuration

[Gavin Lambert]

At 07:11 23/02/2008, Darien Hager wrote:
>Thirded. Myself, whenever I make a cross-user discussion list I 
>ensure the option is set.

Uh-huh.  And you can't even seem to quote properly.  So that's a 
good recommendation.  :P

Seriously people, can we just drop this?  This has come up several 
times before and it always has the same result.

With things as they are now, you have a choice.  You can hit the 
Reply button to reply just to the sender, or the Reply All button 
to reply to the group.  There is no need to edit any of the 
addressing in the latter case, since the mail server is smart 
enough to not send out a second copy to an address that's already 
in the envelope.  (Well, you can tell it to send you an extra copy 
if you really want.  But why?)  If your client filters are set up 
correctly, any such response will still go to the same folder as 
any other list discussion as well.  So there is no downside.

If the Reply-To header is forced, however, suddenly you've just 
made it harder for the people who *do* want to send private 
replies.  While I suppose you could argue that private replies are 
bad and that people should be "encouraged" to post publicly, the 
simple fact is that it's easy enough to change a private reply 
into a public one but impossible to go the other way.  And I've 
seen numerous examples of just such mistakes on lists that do 
force Reply-To.