[Clipart] Librarians be aware of http://www.freeclipartnow.com

[Nathan Eady]

chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Guys, please remember to "reply to all" 

That sends unwanted (and frequently redundant) copies directly to the
sender (and often, if more than one person is doing it, to additional
people as well), a clear violation of standard mailing list semantics
and of nettiquette.

Almost all replies should either go only to the sender, or only to the
list.  The only times you should send to both are when the author
requests it ("please Cc me on any replies"; note that some people
consider this an inherently rude request, but it's not rude to honor
it anyway, if you like) or when you have reason believe that the
author is not subscribed to the list or for some other reason will not
notice the message if you don't Cc him, and you need him to read it.

And no, knowing that the mail list software suppresses sending the
message to people who are in the headers separately is not a good
excuse to go ahead and Cc half the world without cause.  That screws
up automatic mail sorting and scoring and takes away individual
control over the decision to remain subscribed, among other things.
Unless there is a specific reason to do otherwise, replies should go
only to one address, either the author, or the list, not both, and
certainly not also everyone else who has ever posted in the thread.

On announcement lists, where discussion is discouraged, hitting reply
will almost always do the right thing automatically.

On discussion lists, where sending replies back to the list is the
preferred behavior, it is customary for the list to set a Reply-To
header.  However, some mailing lists fail to do this, either because
the list was not intended for discussion, or because the list
administrators are confused about the proper use of the Reply-To
header (which is to indicate where replies should probably go; on a
discussion list, they should virtually always go to the list).  In
these cases, you have two options:

 1) Use a mailreader that allows you to set a list-address that is
    used when replying to messages associated with a particular
    mailing list.  Gnus is one such mailreader.
 
 2) Try to remember to edit the headers by hand each time.

Note too that when you are replying to a message from a discussion
list, if you for some reason deliberately send a reply to the author
rather than the list, this is called "taking the thread off-list", and
it is polite to explain why you are doing this.  If you don't bother
to mention it at all, many people will assume that it was inadvertent
and direct their own reply back to the list.  I will, for instance.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library