Request: make the ML's default return candidate be the ML

[Scott Webster]

I think you should send the email to whom you desire.  You need to use
your email client (I use gmail) to accomplish this in whatever way it
works.

Usually if I am responding to a post to the mailing list I just hit
reply all.  This causes the To: field to contain the authors address
and the Cc: field to contain the mailing list address.  This is what I
want.  I send a reply directly to the author and to the list.  I
include the author because I don't know how they subscribe to the list
exactly and I want to send them a personal reply.

If there are multiple people in the headers such that my "reply all"
puts a bunch of other addresses in the Cc: field then I remove or
leave them based on what I want to accomplish.  If I deem them to just
be a peripheral address that got added in automatically by my email
client then I remove their address.  If I want to also send my message
to them directly I leave them in.

If I want to reply off list then obviously I just put whatever email
address I want in whatever fields.  This is sometimes appropriate
depending on the message you are sending.

You should be free to send whatever email addresses you want.  If
people complain to you about what you are doing then you might want to
take that information into consideration in your future correspondence
with them, but you can't control how people set up their personal
email filters etc.  I would agree that in general you don't want to
have a huge number of addresses of people on the mailing list PLUS the
list address in your Cc: field though.  Only include personal
addresses if you have a reason to do so.

That's just how I do it.  Maybe there's some better internet standards document.

I strongly support the current behaviour of the list in terms of not
munging the reply-to header by the way.  This keeps the behaviour of
my email client consistent for all my emails and I don't have to think
about whether or not I am replying to a list or not to choose which
button to click.

Scott

PS Did you BCC the list on this email or something?  Don't do that! :) :)

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Roger Pack <rogerdpack2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fascinatingly, after following this advice of
> http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html (which was
> recommended in this thread)
>
> "Some people complain that they'll get two copies of the same email.
> Since they're on the list, their first copy is the one sent to them by
> the list. When the responder hit "reply all", it also put their email
> address in the recipient list, so they get a second copy directly. ...
> the second message is a duplicate and can be safely ignored."
>
> I did this in the last thread I participated in.
> I hit "reply all" in gmail, it receives a "To:" field of the original
> author, and a CC: field of the mailing list.  I think this is what the
> above is saying is what we should do.
>
> I then had 2 people respond back to me "hey don't do that, it causes
> my inbox filters to fail and goes straight to my inbox inadvertenly!"
>
> http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html  continues:
>
> "If your mail reader doesn't do this, that's too bad, but it's not an
> excuse to violate Internet standards and surprise people with
> inconsistent behavior, just to prevent you from having to delete a few
> emails. Anyone who gets any spam at all knows how to delete email."
>
> So apparently...I'm supposed to just tell them they aren't compliant [?]
> (In reality what I should send it back to the group as a "To"
> field--does anybody know?  What do other gmail users out there do?)
>
> Thanks!
> -roger-
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