Community technical support mailing list was retired 2010 and replaced with a professional technical support team. For assistance please contact: Pre-sales Technical support via email to sales@march-hare.com.
On Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:07:57 -0500, Scott Ford <SFord at RJKTECH.com> wrote: >I have noticed that when I am lazy and just select respond to messages I get >from this list that the response goes to the sender and not to the list. Is >this intentional or is it a problem with my mail client. I am active in >several other listservs and do not have this problem. > This question gets asked every 6 months or so on most lists (The SpamAssassin list just went through a big flameware after someone came on and *demanded* that the list be set to reply-to-list, even after the reasons why not had been patiently explained - the primary one being that it was a sourceforge list and sourceforge policy is reply-to-sender). Funnily enough, the reply-to-list mailing lists have exactly the opposite question asked every few months! Just goes to show you can't please all of the people, etc.. It's quite common, actually (indeed I haven't seen a reply-to-list mailing list in over a year... they're getting scares). There are good operational reasons to do it. 1. Sometimes you want to reply off-list, and just being able to hit 'reply' is a nice convenience (without it you'd have to do a crude cut&paste). 2. Every mailer in existence has a 'reply to all' - the better ones have 'reply to list', too. 3. Mail loops - every now and then some bozo will use a broken autoresponder, which replies to the message... which causes the list to send the message back to the user, which replies again... etc. this will quickly overload a mailserver, not to mention generate a lot of bad will with the list members. See http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html For the reasons why sourceforge mandated this see: http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6693&group_id=1 If you really hate it there's the cvsnt news server :-) Tony btw. thread closed - if you want to rehash the arguments then google for it... they've all been gone over before & there's no mileage in trying to repeat it all here.