[ba-ohs-talk] using mailing lists effectively
First, a quick note. If you are citing a document with a purple number,
please include a link to that purple number. You can usually do that by
clicking on the number, and copying and pasting the link to your e-mail
app. (01)
Second, I recently changed the configuration of ba-ohs-talk and
ba-unrev-talk so that the Reply-To header points back to the list. For
the most part, most people on Bootstrap-forums don't seem to care, but
those who have spoke out have spoken out in favor of pointing back to the
list. (02)
An IBIS summary of previous discussion on this topic is available here: (03)
http://www.eekim.com/ohs/lc/dialogmaps/ohs-lc.html#nid4001 (04)
There is also an oft-quoted essay on why Reply-To should point back to the
sender: (05)
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html (06)
Why do I bring this up? Because I think it's an intriguing example of
coevolution. The question is, what should the proper behavior be? When
someone sends an e-mail to the entire list when its meant only for the
sender, is that just sheer stupidity on the part of the sender, or should
the applications do something to help prevent this type of mistake? (07)
My gut instinct is that the answer to the latter question is yes, and that
e-mail apps should somehow make the editing field of the To: header more
prominent. However, I'm not even sure that that would make a real
difference, as most people seem to ignore that field by default, assuming
that the field is always correctly set when they hit "Reply." This
behavior is one of my pet peeves, as some people don't pay any attention
to their To and Cc headers at all. I receive extraneous e-mail all the
time, simply because some people are too lazy to remove my e-mail address
from a header. So the question is, is this a social problem or a
technical one? (08)
-Eugene (09)
--
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
| "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
+===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+ (010)