Re: [Pan-users] Emails

[Duncan]

Gerald Livingston posted on Sun, 24 May 2015 14:33:41 -0500 as excerpted:

> Looking at the toolbar of my mail client (Claws Mail) I have
> 
> "Reply"  (Reply to the defaulted reply-to address)
> "All"    (Reply to all addresses from the header)
> "Sender" (Reply to the address in the 'From' header)
> "List"   (Reply to the 'List-Address' header if there is one use
>           'reply-to' if there isn't)
> 
> Defaulting "Reply-to" to the list address is actually the correct way to
> do it for a list like this. When one clicks "Reply" one should expect
> the message to go back to the place it came from. That is the list in
> this instance. There should be a thought process involved in getting
> replies to go elsewhere, otherwise the bulk of list discussions get
> unintentionally taken off-list or, worse, it falls upon the author to
> copy/paste all off-list replies back to the list, usually destroying
> threading in the process.

... And of course here, due to reply before context you were replying to, 
you destroyed natural context-quote/reply threading, instead...

There's a reason pan warns about top-posting.  Even if you /must/ ignore 
it in general email, please at least observe it on the pan list, where 
many people in fact use pan and get and reply to the list as a newsgroup 
(via gmane.org's list2news service).

(Tho I agree with the address stuff I quoted above, and FWIW, I too use 
claws-mail... for normal mail and for web feeds.  For lists, as above, I 
use gmane to get them as newsgroups and thus use pan.)

And of course pan has followup to group (which happens to followup to 
list, in this case, via gmane), and reply to author via email.  There was 
a reply to all as well, but IIRC it was removed as a break of netiquette, 
since most folks posting to a group want the reply there, not via their 
normal mail inbox, unless they say otherwise.

In fact, while it obviously doesn't work for lists, for regular newsgroup 
posting I've long used a munged address, with a note in the sig saying 
see the instructions in the (custom) headers to reply directly.  Along 
with removing the email address sections that do the munging, these 
instructions also say to append a keyword ( -news, that is, space dash 
news) to the end of the subject line, which then allows me to filter as 
spam anything that doesn't have that keyword appended.

This is indeed pretty strict, but it's also pretty effective.  The 
address is valid but munged, with instructions for reaching me so people 
in the newsgroups I post to can reply to me via personal email if they 
need to bad enough to jump thru the hoops, but those same hoops 
discourage people from mailing me directly for stuff that really /should/ 
be on the newsgroup.  I ended up having to do this, because some of my 
longer and more technical replies take a couple hours to compose and 
check, and at one point right before I did this, I had about three 
different private email conversations going on with three different 
people, about the same not-really-private technical issue.  Had they 
stuck to the list, not only could I have replied once to all, but they'd 
each see the newsgroup posts of the others and could have thus solved a 
good portion of the problem that they couldn't, because they couldn't see 
each other's replies.  And I didn't feel right CCing them all without 
asking first.  And not only that, but sometimes I get tired or sick or 
simply don't have time, or my idea doesn't end up solving the problem, 
and on the newsgroup/mailinglist, others can and often do step in with 
answers, too.  They may not have the technical background or nice 
explanations mine do when I /do/ reply, but I can't reply to everyone 
with a problem, and even where I do, I can be wrong too, while someone 
else might get it right.

Unfortunately, since the mailing lists (and gmane) only post properly 
with a real email address, I gotta use an unmunged address for the 
lists.  Tho as you can see it's a dedicated address, and if it starts 
getting /too/ much spam I can drop it and start another, as I've already 
had to do once, tho it'd be a big hassle now as this address has built up 
a reasonably good reputation and association over the years.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman