Re: mea máxima culpa

[Evan Driscoll]

The main reason I'm responding to this is to point out that if you use
digests, it's possible to configure it so that it sends each message as
an attachment instead of just dumping them all into the message body.

If you see something you want to respond to, you can just open up the
corresponding attachment and hit reply to that.

To set this up, go to the mailmain page
(https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/options/lilypond-user), find the "Get
MIME or Plain Text Digests?" question (currently the third), and set it
to to MIME.


A caveat: It's not the greatest interface, for third reasons. First,
depending on your email client you *may* have to open each attachment to
read the contents. However, this isn't a problem with Thunderbird and
probably others that display text attachments inline with the email
text, and what you see if you open the email in Thunderbird (or look at
it in the preview pane) is basically identical to the plain-text digest
mode. Second, if you're using something like Thunderbird that does so,
finding the attachment that corresponds to a message sometimes takes a
couple of tries, especially because each message actually comes through
twice and (at least in Thunderbird) you can only reply to one of them.
Not sure what's up with that. Third, it seems to lead to "Re: Re:"
headings for some reason. Not sure what's up with that either. As a
result it's not the best choice for everyone, but if you're like me and
want to cut down on the number of emails, but still skim over them for
ones of interest, but almost never reply, but want to be careful to
provide the correct in-reply-to etc. headers, I think it works well.


Evan

----

[I have reservations about sending the rest of this because I don't want
to carry the topic to far afield, but what the hell.]

Now, that being said and because I'm sure no one cares, IMO the way the
Lilypond list is set up ("reply" goes to the sender) is *absolutely* the
correct way to run a mailing list, and the alternative is completely
maddening.


On 9/12/2013 1:21 PM, Carl Peterson wrote:
> (1) 99% of the time, if I'm replying to a message, I'm intending to
> reply to the list. Defaults are usually selected to in some way minimize
> effort, which brings me to (2), I'm lazy. Reply all requires extra
> mouse-clicks.

Here's the flip side of that argument.

What action is *common* is only one of the two things that should be
considered when assigning a default. Also should be considered is how
damaging the other choice is. Replying to the list when you want to
respond just to the sender has the potential to be a much more
"damaging" action than replying to just the sender when you want to send
to the list.


On 9/12/2013 2:03 PM, Carl Peterson wrote:
> It also discourages the delightful idiots who insist on replying all
> to a mass mailing (when the original sender didn't have the decency or
> know-how to stick the recipient names in the bcc).

Personally I never really got that argument. I almost always reply all
to discussions like that. Why? The following two assumptions:

1) If the original sender CC'd someone, it's because they thought that
   person would be interested in the contents.

2) If someone is interested in an email, there's a good chance they'll
   be interested in follow-up emails.

I definitely pay attention to who I keep on the CC list and will remove
people if I have reason to believe the followup is a lot less relevant
for them, but that's my general rule of thumb. Maybe it's just because I
don't get enough emails, but I get *way* more annoyed when it seems like
I've been dropped from a mail thread that was relevant to me then I do
when I get extra emails that are *not* relevant.

Personally, I don't see the reason for BCC besides a CYA move.

Evan