David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 08:48 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
>
>> What chaps my hide is it isn't that hard to just delete the CCs. I
>>happen to use one of the few clients that doesn't do it ans also participate
>>on lists where CCs are discouraged. Had to remove 2 from this message because
>>of other people's laziness. The List does the distribution, thank you, no
>>need to make everyone's client do the same.
>
>
> Note that it's not necessarily laziness. Some people consider it
> extremely rude if you follow up to a posting of theirs without doing
> them the courtesy of a Cc. They may not have been subscribed to the
> list, or they may be reading the list only sporadically.
In either case, if they want to be included in the discussion they should do
everyone else involved the courtesy of reading the list. To not do so and
expect everyone else to email them personally is, IMHO, excedingly rude.
>
> Unless I _know_ (and remember) that the person to whom I'm replying
> dislikes receiving duplicate copies but _hasn't_ bothered to arrange
> filtering out of duplicates, I wouldn't normally remove addresses as I
> have done in this case.
Why should I have to go to the trouble of filtering out extraneous and
unnecessary messages?
>
> Again consider the failure modes. One way round, you rudely exclude a
> person from a discussion they wanted to participate in.
This statement is factually incorrect - by not sending a personal email you
have excluded noone from the discussion. If someone wants to be involved
it's up to them to involve themselves. As to whether it's rude or not,
that's your personal opinion and I disagree with it. I find it annoying to
receive duplicate messages.
The problem created by making the list default to reply to an individual
rather than the list means many replies are *only* sent to the individual
and this *does* exclude everyone else on the list. I could understand if you
considered that to be rude. I have many examples of exactly this in my
inbox. I can't imagine that all the presonal replies I've received to
messages sent to the list are because the respondant conciously chose to
exclude the rest of the list from the discussion. The reason it's bad is
that the main principle of a discussion list is to disseminate and archive
knowledge. By bypassing the list and replying direct neither is achieved.
> The other way,
> someone gets an extra mail or two which they could do without. Which
> failure mode is it more important to avoid?
So, the former will include everyone on the list and send no duplicate
messages, the latter will either send duplicate messages or exclude everyone
else on the list. It doesn't seem to be a difficult choice to me.
--
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail : nmw@???
Phone : +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555
