Re: Understanding response protocols

I fully intended to stay out of this, because it is a well-known 
rathole, but ...

On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Keith Moore wrote:

> - People often end up wanting to change the recipient list of a reply 
>   after they have started composing the text of a message, indicating that the 
>   "push the right reply button before you compose" model is broken.

I rarely want to change the recipient list, so I might dispute your 
"often". But when I do, my MUA allows me to. I don't think anyone 
disagrees with the notion that whatever button the user pushes, the MUA 
should construct some recipient list, and then let the user modify it if
he/she wishes.

> - It's not as if 95% of repliers want to do the same thing in every case.

In my case, at least 99.9% of the time, I hit "R" and "Y" in Pine to
"reply to all" when replying, either to personal or mailing list 
messages. Probably about 0.9% of the time I then modify the list of
recipients. The other 0.1% is when there is a message of such import
that I decide in advance that I want to do something unusual.

>   Small mistakes in communications can have large consequences.

That is certainly true.

Philip

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
[email protected]      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.