Re: [Gnu-arch-users] fixing the problem of posting to the old mailing list

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Jonathan" == Jonathan Walther <address@hidden> writes:

    Jonathan> I mirror the reply-to considered harmful article on my
    Jonathan> website.  I've had it there for years.  I know what it
    Jonathan> says.  But it is also plain WRONG.  The world has moved
    Jonathan> on, and most mail clients don't support the standards.

I haven't noticed any problems.  The correspondents I care about
either have decent clients or suffer with their broken corporate-
imposed software in silence.  :-)

I don't see why people whose clients are conformant should suffer
because the majority chooses to use clients that are not conformant.
Furthermore, the non-conformant clients are almost universally non-
free software.

Why are you advocating violating the standards to make life easy for
non-free software?

    Jonathan> Do I bitch and moan because M$ email clients tell
    Jonathan> everyone that my properly RFC compliant emails in full
    Jonathan> MIME format have "unrecognized attachments" and are
    Jonathan> "probably viruses"?

If you don't, you should.  Noblesse oblige.  How are they ever going
to learn, otherwise?  Of course most standards bigots are buttheads
(cf http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Tools/Attitude/, and of course
http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq)), but it's not hard to be
politely educational if that's your preference.

    Jonathan>   Adapt to reality.  reply-to munging is done on the gnu
    Jonathan> and the original mailing list because most peoples mail
    Jonathan> clients otherwise send list mails to private individuals

What's wrong with that?  It is _wrong_ when a thoughtless press of a
single key can waste a few seconds or more of thousands of people's
time.  If people can't spend a second of thought and a mouse gesture
on consciously selecting the list as addressee, you have to wonder if
what they have to say is important enough to forward to the list.
There's plenty of saliva from Pavlov's dogs on the 'net; why encourage
more?

True, if I personally get a post that's intended for a list, it's
annoying for me.  But it's sufficiently embarrassing for the sender
that the only people (two of them) who have done it to me more than
once are in my killfile for _other_ good and sufficient cause.

Note that most modern broken clients presumably have memory in the
address field, so you press on the little down-arrow and select the
line "address@hidden" from the menu.  Big deal.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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