On Mar 30, 2007, at 3:08 PM, Erik Hatcher wrote:

> On Mar 30, 2007, at 2:40 PM, Hilmar Lapp wrote:
>
>> It's not a charged issue, it's simply a harmful but entirely
>> unnecessary practice. For a much more eloquent explanation, see for
>> example
>>
>> http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
>
> bah!    reply-all sucks, it ends up duplicating mails unless you
> manually munge the sender list.

First, I find identifying and deleting duplicate emails rather
trivial than noticing it as an issue. Second, decent mailing list
managers will do that for you, for example mailman.

>
>> Besides, not all email clients have a reply-to-sender feature (mine -
>> Apple Mail - for example doesn't), but practically all have a reply-
>> to-all feature.
>
> not true.  click on the From and "Reply to Sender".

I'm a button feeder, sorry. Obscure features aren't obscure because
they are meant for frequent and everyone's consumption.

I'm also a huge fan of simplicity in life. Reply-to munging makes
things difficult (or call it obscure) that ought to (and can) be very
simply, whereas not making things even simpler that are already simple.

Finally, I'm also too old to engage in an argument about whether the
decision should be mine where a reply to an email that I receive
should go to, or that of a mailing list administrator. I also feel
fortunate that virtually all of the communities I interact with (no,
I'm not a librarian) don't think that there's any debate about that
question.

        -hilmar

--
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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