RE: [xri] mailing list settings

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@cordance.net>]

Mary,

Thanks for the answer. The way it works with the settings OASIS uses is:

* Reply just goes to the sender of the message.
* Reply-All goes to the sender _and_ to the list.

Since the vast majority of replies to list messages (95+%) need to go to the
list, most people just hit Reply-All. The problem is that each time they do
that, it adds the sender to the address line, so as more senders join a
thread, the list of senders getting two copies of each reply keeps growing.

It is a pain.

My personal solution is to hit Reply-All, then erase any individual sender
and just leave the list address UNLESS I think a reply is important enough
to make sure the sender gets their own copy (some of us run rules that can
filter on that fact, but it has to be a pretty fancy rule - with my Outlook
rules, I just end out with two copies of the message in my list folder).

What Will is advocating is in fact the most common behavior for most lists,
which is setting the Reply-To header so that it doesn't matter if you hit
Reply or Reply-All - in both cases the reply just goes to the list.

That way, a sender is not added unless someone makes a conscious decision
that a particular reply is important enough to manually add the sender.

I personally believe Wil is right, and OASIS should change the default
setting for TC lists (or at least allow a TC to choose this setting).
Reply-To control is a standard feature of any decent list manager.

But I'm not going to spend a bunch of time on it. (Others on the TC may care
more than I do.) At a minimum you might add it to the list of OASIS policy
decisions to revisit the next time it comes up.

Thanks,

=Drummond 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mary McRae [mailto:mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 3:54 PM
> To: Drummond Reed
> Cc: xri@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: Re: [xri] mailing list settings
> 
> What Drummond said. :-)  Most people (I guess depending on the set you
> ask) prefer that reply go to a single individual and that reply-all go
> to the list. It just makes grammatical sense that way. If reply went
> to the list, would reply-all go to the individual? Or would you
> somehow have to hand-craft the to field to reply to just the sender?
> 
> m
> 
> Mary P McRae
> Director, Technical Committee Administration
> OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
> email: mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org
> web: www.oasis-open.org
> twitter: fiberartisan
> phone: 1.603.232.9090
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mar 24, 2009, at 6:40 PM, Drummond Reed wrote:
> 
> > Will,
> >
> > We've checked into that before, but the settings for OASIS mailing
> > lists are
> > set globally by OASIS, and for some reason this is their current
> > policy.
> >
> > However to refresh our memories (or in case that policy may have
> > changed),
> > I'm cc'ing our TC Administrator Mary McRae to ask her to explain
> > what the
> > options are (or are not ;-)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > =Drummond
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Will Norris [mailto:will@willnorris.com]
> >> Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 11:11 AM
> >> To: xri@lists.oasis-open.org TC
> >> Subject: [xri] mailing list settings
> >>
> >> just a side note... would anyone have objections to changing the
> >> mailing list so that the reply-to address is the list itself
> >> (assuming
> >> we can).  That way we don't end up with CC lines that needlessly
> >> duplicate upwards of a half dozen people who are on the mailing list
> >> anyway.  Or do some people actually like getting duplicate copies of
> >> those emails?
> >>
> >> -will
> >>
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> >
> >