Replying to list

[Derek Moss]

On 3 August 2012 18:28, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-08-03 at 17:59 +0100, Derek Moss wrote:
>> When I reply to a message it always puts the e-mail of the sender
>> rather than the list in the To field. The only way round this I've
>> found so far is to click Reply All and then cut
>> get_iplayer at lists.infradead.org from the CC field and paste it in the
>> To field but is there a better way, as I keep forgetting and just
>> click Reply and don't always notice it's going to the sender rather
>> than the list?
>>
>> I'm using gmail if that makes any difference.
>
> Any sane mailer should have a private 'reply' function, and a 'reply to
> all' function. If you click the private reply, that's what you get. If
> you 'reply to all', that's also what you get.
>
> I know there are some mailing lists which override that *private* reply,
> and trick you into sending messages to the list when you intended it to
> be private. That's a really stupid idea and we don't do it here.
>
> --
> dwmw2

I don't think it's stupid idea at all when dealing with mailing lists
as the majority of the time you want people to post to the list and
not individual users and on the rare occasion that someone actually
wants to reply privately to the user, if their address was put in the
CC field by Reply All they can do this by cutting and pasting the
user's address to the To field.

At the moment users have to cut and paste the list address from the CC
field every time they want to reply to the list (using Reply All) and
that does seem stupid and bound to lead to messages accidentally being
sent privately instead of to the list.

As I said, I do have both Reply and Reply Alln in gmail but as with
any e-mail program it's not marked "Private Reply" and it's natural
that users would expect Reply to send the message to the list.