[conspire] Ancient flamewar public service announcement

[Rick Moen]

A frequent poster to this mailing list sent me several offlist replies,
because brain-damaged handling of mail elsewhere had conditioned him to 
give up on the distinction between on-list and off-list mail, and he'd
(repeatedly) used his mail program's reply-sender command -- which
did what it say on the tin, send off-list mail to just _me_.

So, we had the discussion that follows.  And FYI, to my knowledge every
LUG mailing list in the Bay Area except a shameful few, that I won't
name here, _avoids_ the error of force-rewriting posters' headers and
overriding their intentions.




> Yes, I will resend the email.  Too many other email servers cause
> every reply to go to everyone and make it difficult to reply to just
> the sender.  Conspire gets it right, but is unfortunately the
> outlier in this behavior.

I know.

Still, reply-all does serve as a best-available method that _tries_ to
do the right thing even on mailing lists that munge Reply-To.  (FWIW,
some particularly good MUAs including mutt deliberately, by default,
ignore Reply-To munging on mailing lists as crazy-shit brain damage that
should not be honoured.

I'm serious, anyway:  It really is best to train your fingers to do
Reply-all for all on-list replies, and Reply-sender for offlist mails.

If you adopt that practice, you'll notice that mailing lists doing
Reply-To munging will attempt to sabotage your attempts to send offlist
mail using your MUA's Reply-sender command, inappropriately trying to
trick your MUA into forcing your offlist comment onto the mailing list
against your explicit intentions.  This is the biggest single reason
munging is misguided idiocy and actively harmful.

Where those munged lists are running atop GNU Mailman, you as a
subscriber can disable munging for your subscription by visiting
subscriber options and switching it off.  Then, Mailman will cease
attempting to sabotage your attempts to send private mail.

All of that damage, all of that idiocy, results from a horde of
technophobes insisting that they cannot possibly learn to use two
different reply commands, and instead must never be expected to use
anything but one (they think is) called 'Reply' that should magically
figure out what to do -- and listadmins who stupidly enable this
behaviour, even though the controversy was settled by IETF 17 years ago,
and munging lost.  As the line from War Games said, 'The only way to win
is not to play.'