Re: [PATCH 11/11] auth_ldap: added logging

On May 7, 2012, at 11:35 AM, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:

> On May 7, 2012, at 11:26, Matt Simerson wrote:
> 
>> Is there some community I'm unaware of where replying to the individual on a public list is the norm? 
> 
> The mistake of replying to the individual is cheap.

It also requires extra effort on the vast majority of replies. The point of being on a public list is to encourage "group" discussion, and replying to the list facilitates that. Requiring extra effort to do that is not expensive but is is frequent. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. 

The "easy" workaround of Reply-All means recipients get duplicate emails by hitting "Reply-All".  Of course, good MUA's suppress the duplicate, but it's still wasteful. For the obsessive, that don't like burdening other users with Reply-All detritus, just in case the senders MUA sucks, or they're reading email on a phone where bandwidth isn't cheap/free, I manually change the reply-to address on every single email.

> The mistake of replying to the list is potentially expensive in time wasted, embarrassment, etc.

And it's also rare. In the 1990's, and perhaps even early 2000's when mailing lists were new, this argument had some validity. But everyone that ever might join a mailing list already has, and practically every one has already made the "oops, that should have been private" mistake. Because practically every list currently has Reply-To as the default, it is "what is expected" by list users.

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

Those arguments held some weight 10 years ago. If that were the default on most lists today, the world might be a better place. Or not. But either way, besides a rare few holdouts, that's just not how anyone expects mailing lists to work.

Matt