reply-all should be discouraged

cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com
Tue Feb 23 17:50:07 EST 2010


* Mark Johnson <mrj001 at shaw.ca> [2010-02-22 16:50]:
>>
> Agreed.  I have ten years of software development experience, and I
> have actually coded an implementation of the SMTP protocol.  

The headers we're talking about are not on the envelope.  They're
actually part of the message payload, and have nothing to do with
SMTP.  

> I do NOT have any idea of how to get my e-mail client (Thunderbird)
> to insert an extra mail header.  

There are countless email headers for various specific purposes.  Not
being able to insert a header is obviously limiting.  Advanced clients
don't tie the users hands and close-box the headers.  A good client
will not only let you add headers on the fly, but it will let you
configure custom header insertion based on properties of the message.
Eg. If the TO field has your recruiters email address, you might have
a header for "Organisation" or "X-Location" inserted.  Or if it's a
tech saavy user, you might have it set to insert the X-PGP-KeyID
header inserted.

> It is not proper for an e-mail client to require the user to know
> any of this anyway.

This is like saying it wouldn't be proper for a tool to assume the
user knows what the Reply-To field is for.  Tools can compose the
header in a sensible way by default, but the tool cannot guess whether
the user wants a personal reply.  It would be incompetent for a
developer to implement a tool to compose the mail-followup-to field
without enabling the user to edit it.  Good quality MUAs will supply
the field and prefill it with the list address, but make it editable.

> I doubt Thunderbird is deficient.  

Deficiency depends on what you require of the tool.  If Thunderbird
composes all the headers that you need personally, then it's not
deficient for your requirements.  For myself, it's quite 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.  

Of course it would be.  Of course an MUA cannot have awareness of the
hundreds of possible headers that exist and will exist in the future.
To claim it's improper for a mail client to support user defined
headers is absurd.  

> It would be too subject to errors such as typos, even making the
> assumption that people know what mail headers are.

Even the TO field is subject to typographical errors.  It's obviously
not practical to expect an MUA to have a pre-entered selection of all
possible headers.  The risk of typos can be reduced by configuring
them.  But when a user needs to enter an obscure one-off header (like
X-Stamper-To), why is it any more proper to force the user to add this
header in the configuration?  


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