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

Albert Y. C. Lai trebla at vex.net
Sat Aug 2 21:46:26 UTC 2014


My points from the least immaterial to the most immaterial:

I am now agnostic to how people define the semantics of Reply-To, so I'm 
fine with Haskell-Cafe using it or not. This is because I have seen 
enough of different people having conflicting stakes on it.

I still have an opinion on Reply-To. This is because the modern headers 
List-Id, List-Post, etc. exist and are already in use. Haskell-Cafe has 
them, for example. They have taken off one burden from Reply-To; one 
fewer stakeholder group should be contending for it. Ideally, you should 
instead rally for all email clients to make use of List-Post. 
(Thunderbird does. It gives me a "reply to list" button.)

(Practically, we're talking about human society, it's hopeless.)

I am also on a mailing list that sets both List-Post and Reply-To to the 
mailing list address for the kick of it. This is because most members 
insist on using old clients, old enough to not know about List-Post at 
all. (And old enough to be text mode, that's why. They insist on text 
terminals.)

And lastly, to bring the mention of text terminals back to the mention 
of Haskell: a picture shared by someone in IRC #haskell-blah:
http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/x/art/terminal-ghci.png

(It occurs to me that it is today's powerful graphic cards that enable 
fast rendering of yesterday's distorted text!)


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