[Haskell-cafe] Does web-based email harm mailman lists?

[Kim-Ee Yeoh]

Beautiful haskell people,

Ever noticed the lacunae on some list threads?

Someone hits reply and instead of reflecting via mailman, it goes direct to
OP. OP notices absence of To:haskell-cafe and adds it back in in their
reply to the reply.

End result? The thread looks like OP having a convo with themselves. Unless
you look at the quoted parts, which you have to click to reveal in
web-based email.

The convention, say with a google-groups based mailing list, is that
conversations in mailing list are public by default. With some manual C&P,
you can email responses in private.

For cafe participants using web-based email, the situation is reversed,
through no fault of their own.

Approx 18 months ago, the haskell-beginners list suffered the same problem
[1]. After some digging, it looks like there's a configurable option to Do
The Right Thing:

http://ccit.mines.edu/Mailman-FAQ#25

I was also privately emailed that there are downsides I wasn't aware of:

Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

Reply-To Munging Considered Useful
http://www.metasystema.org/essays/reply-to-useful.html

So what happened in the aftermath?

Not much that I can tell. Everything just purred along.

Now you might argue that haskell-cafe will just purr along grandly as well
given the status quo.

But this is a wrinkle that probably needs some awareness at least, hence
this email.

Would you like this fixed? The list owner would need to be obliged upon.

[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/beginners/2013-January/011304.html

-- Kim-Ee
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