list choices (was [Haskell-cafe] ANN: filestore 0.1)

[Jeremy Shaw]

At Sun, 25 Jan 2009 10:02:28 +0000,
Malcolm Wallace wrote:

> (And on the topic of duplicate mails, it would reduce _so_ much  
> irritation if all the haskell-related mailing lists could set the  
> Reply-To header to the list, instead of defaulting to the original  
> poster.  I already have enough email to deal with without having 3 or  
> sometimes 4 copies of every message in every thread that I participate  
> in.)

The duplicate messages will have the same Message-ID, can't your email
client hide the duplicates for you? You might have to enable an option
or something?

I am pretty sure Reply-to munging has been discussed on this list
before (mostly because it will eventually be discussed on every
mailing list). The usual consent is that many people hate it, it
violates the standards set by the IETF, it results in people
accidently sending private messages to the list.

I think one reason why people don't like Reply-to munging is that many
people filter the haskell-cafe mailing list into a separate folder
that they only read occasionally. So, if they post a message they
*want* the reply to go to their main inbox as well as the mailing list
folder. Otherwise they would have to keep checking the mailing list
folder to see if they had any replies, instead of just checking their
inbox. 

I believe there are two solutions to your problem:

 1. set the Reply-to header yourself to specify how you want people to
 reply to messages you post. If you only want them to do to the list,
 then set that. Some email clients can be configured to do this
 automatically when posting to specific mailing lists.

 2. use (or configure) a mail client that can hide duplicate messages.


http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html

-j