Thoughts from the abyss

I got into a bit of a pissing contest today with someone on a list, which I’m not going to mention. I’m not mad, and so therefore I’m not getting too personal about this argument. I’ll start from the beginning. I’m going to use two mailing lists, A and B as my examples. I’m a member of mailing list A and for over a year now since I’ve been a member, they munge the message to include a Reply-To header. This means they wipe the header information so you can’t reply to only the author privately. Obviously for them, they think it’s better to send all traffic through the list. At any rate, you never have to worry about sending duplicate messages, or sending accidentally messages to a private user…which obviously some people despise for some reason. Now, I’m very used to just clicking either Reply or Reply-To on Thunderbird and it automatically goes to the list.

Mailing list B, however, doesn’t work this way. They leave the headers intact so when you click Reply, you get the original author, and when you click Reply-To, you get the original author, any Cc:’s that have been added along the way, and the mailing list’s address. Well, what happens when you’re used to mailing on list A but you’re replying to list B’s questions….

Obviously, sometimes you forget to yank out all the To: and Cc:’s leaving only the list’s address before you click send. This made this person a bit pissy. Now, after asking my more knowledgeable boss, he passed me on this link: Reply-To Munging. Now, the point I was getting to with this entire thing. If you read through the document I pointed you to, you’ll notice at the bottom, and I quote “On the whole, it has worked out quite well. Yes, on occasion somebody mistakenly responds directly to the author of a message when they wanted to reply to the group.”

That’s what I accidentally did today and the person seemed to get all bent out of shape. But on e-mails to follow, I remembered and changed things. While I understand the benefits of leaving the headers alone, especially after reading the link, I can see it both ways as well. Secondly, if the list is going to leave the headers alone then they must show some sort of tolerance for people who mistakenly (or people who never even look) don’t check over where the mail is getting sent. Now, I completely understand that many geeks are going to say “well, if they aren’t checking to see where the mail is going, what the hell are they doing on the list.” Ummm…it’s a help list.

So this brings me to my conclusion, if you don’t add a Reply-To on the e-mails, then expect some private messages to accidentally get sent to you from a mailing list. Next, exhibit some type of patience or tolerance to people if you’re not going to make it easier for a normal user to reply to a help list. Lastly, don’t act like your time is more important than their time when you do receive a personal message. If it happens more than once, kindly explain how it works, hit the delete button and shut up. If you see the user has fixed it on subsequent e-mails, then why bother wasting time saying anything at all. Obviously, they were smart enough to figure it out all by their lonesome. Don’t act like you’re better than them and belittle them with typing in capital letters.