Re: I did it again! was RE: Where to buy parts?

On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Mark Jenison wrote:

> First of all, commonly when you receive e-mail, there is a
>
> From: <person>
>
> When you press "reply" (or whatever you mailer does), usually the "From:"
> person is propagated to the "To:" position.
>
> This is the case 99.9999% out of my day from receiving e-mails from people
> asking question. It becomes habbit, and that's why these people make mistakes.
>
> Why is this list is set up opposite of this intuitive way?

        This was my point. This is totally configurable by your mailer,
NOT the list. In the message that I am responding to now, the "From:"
field was your name and email address, Mark. The vectorlist (and its
address) was listed in the "Reply To:" field. Pine (the mailer that I am
using) asks you if you want to use the "Reply To:" field when you reply to
the message. The default, of course, is yes, and that is how I make my
mistakes (just hitting return, because 99% of the time, I do want to reply
to the "Reply To:" field.)

        I think it is more intuitive to reply to the list when a message
is posted through the list. If this was changed, then everybody's mailers
would default to replying back to the author privately, and through
similar mastakes, people would forget to change the "To" field to the
list, and the author would get a bunch of replies meant for all the
memebrs of the list, but only the author would see them. THat's why I
think it should be left alone.

        No one was complaining (at least publicly) about people making
mistakes and posting that stuff to the list, instead of email. Everybody
does that from time to time, and I think everybody knows that they (and
everybody else) does it.
  
> My other rant is my mailer nicely supported the way it was set up PREVIOUSLY.
> I
> simply had to press "reply" to get the specific person, and "reply all" to send
> to the group. Also, when I sent something, I would get a copy of my e-mail
> back to me in my inbox so I could see what I had sent out (and quickly correct
> any mistakes with a follow up e-mail).

        I'm not going to try to understand how your mailer is set up, but
you should be able to get a copy of the messages that you post to
vectorlist if you set the mail ack option to on. You SHOULD be able to
set your mailer so that it doesn't default to replying to "Reply To:"
field, if that is what you want.

> What would make sense is that if the "From" line said from vectorlist, the cc
> line be the person that sent it (so they would get a copy, and others could
> figure out who sent it).

        Why does this make any more sense than the way it is now?

        Newsgroups are set up pretty much the same way. They have the
author's name in the "From:" line of the message, and the newsgroup in the
"Reply To:" line. You can either followup to the newsgroup (its analogy
is replying to the list) or reply to the author. The default to a
newsgroup is to reply to the newsgroup (usually) and it makes sense that
the default should be to reply to the mailing list if replying to a
mailing list message.

Joe
Received on Tue Aug 24 18:36:34 1999