[pulseaudio-discuss] Reply-to

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Lu Guanqun at 21/09/11 07:19 did gyre and gimble:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 02:09:01PM +0800, David Henningsson wrote:
>> On 09/21/2011 05:21 AM, Lu Guanqun wrote:
>>> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 08:32:39PM +0800, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>> See the blog post I pointed to my reply on the other thread.
>>>
>>> Hi Col,
>>>
>>> This might not be related to this thread, but can I request you to
>>> change the behaviour of this mailing list a bit? Generally what this
>>> mailing list does is to reply to the list directly without the replier
>>> been CC-ed. However, in this way, if they don't check this mailing list
>>> regularly, they might miss some mails. Is it possible to change it to
>>> default Cc the person?
>>
>> Being in the same situation for another list: AFAIK, this is not 
>> possible to set globally. You can choose to have the mailinglist or the 
>> original sender as being the default to reply to, whereas having the 
>> original sender will lead to people mistakenly responding in private. 
>> This is IMO worse than people mistakenly not cc:ing in the original poster.
>>
>> I think it is up to everyone to be disciplined enough to use "Reply All" 
>> instead of "Reply" in their e-mail reader.
> 
> Yes, it's better for everyone to use "Reply to All", but there's some
> extra effort.
> 
> What makes think the behaviour might be changed is when I check the
> email header, there's a line below:
> 	Reply-To: General PulseAudio Discussion <pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org>
> Thus, the mail client will try to reply to this address first. I'm
> asking is it possible to remove this line.
> [I'm not familiar with email processing system, so that might be wrong...]

Removing that header will just mean that instead of going to the list,
it *only* goes to the sender and *does not* go to the list if you just
hit reply.

I think this is worse.

If there were a setting that allows list+sender in reply-to then that
would be fine, I'd be happy to set that, but I don't think it's
practical as once you get two or more participants, the sender + list
reply to no longer includes all the interested parties. You need to
include all the CC's too and that requires either a very funcky reply-to
header setup that no doubt won't work in all clients, or for people to
use the reply-to-all option. I think the latter is easier.



I also think it's important to encourage people involved in PA to read
the list anyway. Lots of things happen there and it's very easy to miss
key bits of functionality or methods of working if you don't keep up
with what's happening. It's not a very high traffic list by an stretch
of the imagination, so I don't think this is too big an ask. It's quite
frustrating to get a mail from someone you know has been subscribed for
a while when they ask a question that was discussed on the list the week
before (I'm sure I've been guilty of similar acts so I won't judge too
critically!). Normally a quick "see archives from last week" reply is
enough and that person can look over their unread mails.

That and we're also a community. We want people who have received help
and advice from us in the past to help pass information and tips on to
others. Myself and a few of the other core folks try very hard to reply
to people seeking help on the list and I think it's important to
encourage everyone who follows it to do the same and spread the burden.


So "tricking" people into following the list has IMO many benefits which
go beyond simple convenience for the end recipient.

That's my general thoughts on it :)

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
  Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/]
  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]