reply-all should be discouraged

[Mark Johnson]

Colin Law wrote:
> On 21 February 2010 10:18,  <cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That's fair enough, but it doesn't justify sending dupes to
>> subscribers on a regular basis, without their request.  If someone
>> needs a personal copy of responses because they don't have access to
>> the list replies, they can request it specifically because it's an
>> exceptional case.  That's the regular practice on mailing lists to
>> reduce the problems imposed on subscribers.
>>
>> The proper way for someone to request personal copies simply to
>> include the header "Mail-Followup-To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org, [their
>> personal address]".
>>     
>
> I wonder how many users of this list have the slightest idea how to do
> this.  It is just not a practical suggestions.
>   
Agreed.  I have ten years of software development experience, and I have 
actually coded an implementation of the SMTP protocol.  I do NOT have 
any idea of how to get my e-mail client (Thunderbird) to insert an extra 
mail header.  It is not proper for an e-mail client to require the user 
to know any of this anyway.
>>
>> Folks with broken or deficient mail clients use Reply-All for lack of
>> a proper Reply-To-List feature.  It's not something that should be
>> encouraged, because users with these kind of deficient MUAs tend not
>> to have good filtering themselves, and are generally unaware of the
>> issues caused by not cleaning up the header to just contain the list
>> address.  Simply encouraging the use of Reply-All is in effect saying:
>> it's okay to be lazy, and send copies everywhere, and let everyone
>> else sort it out.
>>
>> If you only encourage Reply-To-List, users who don't have that feature
>> will figure out that they need to Reply-All, and then clean up the
>> header.  Otherwise they'll simply think it's proper to ignore
>> Mail-Followup-To header, and that it's okay to send everyone
>> unrequested personal copies.
>>     
>
> Just how would users figure out that they need to Reply-All and then
> clean up the header? How many users know how to 'clean up the header'.
>  Many do not even know what the header is.  This is a financial
> application users list not an IT list.
>
> Colin
>
>   
I doubt Thunderbird is deficient.  I've also taken a quick search of the 
help and the menus and did not find any way to manually add a header.  
Nor would it be proper for Thunderbird to do so.  It would be too 
subject to errors such as typos, even making the assumption that people 
know what mail headers are.

Mark