Re: Two copies of email when cc-ed in mailing lists

On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 09:46:36PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
> I have known of this document for a long time. It exemplifies what is
> wrong with essays titled “foobar considered harmful” instead of “the
> pros and cons of foobar”:

While I get your point about one-size solutions and "musts" being a bad
thing, I think in this case, the con of foobar here, at least in many
cases, is pretty significant in almost all cases.

That is, the pro (less risk of copying a single person an extra time on
the same message, or risk of accidentally replying privately when you
mean to reply to the list) affects many fewer people than the con (risk
of accidentally replying to the entire list, with potentially hundreds
or thousands of members, and risking personal embarassment, when you
were trying to reply to a single person).

And, while sometimes it can screw up filtering / classification, there
are various technical solutions to minimize or avoid duplicates.

Of course, either way, for people who use mutt themselves, mutt has you
covered both with "list-reply" and with $ignore_list_reply_to, but that
doesn't help other users.

All that said, I personally can't get too worked up about these kinds of
battles anymore, because the bigger picture is that most people don't
use email lists or USENET anywhere near as much as was common 20+ years
ago. So the amount this sort of annoyance (esp. a minor one like getting
a second copy of a mesage to a list, which, ironically, happened to me
on this thread), doesn't really get me worked up the way it might have
back then.

Other than this list, I would say I'm basically not on any discussion
lists anymore, and even in cases where I'm using things like Google
Groups, they're usually for distributing messages to a group or handling
permissions, vs. active discussion. Some people's experiences will be
different, of course, but I feel like a lot of the things that used to
be handled via email, whether for work, technical discussion, or
whatever, are now handled on discussion boards, Slack communities, and
the like.

w