I suspect most of us who are failing to feel Mr. Sheldon's pain on this just fail to understand the burden that's been placed on him by this problem. As an occasional poster to this and other lists, I sometimes get a few duplicate replies, which, being sent directly to me, end up in my regular mailbox instead of my NANOG folder, and thus require me to actively delete or sort through them. As an occasional issue, it seems like a natural result of sending out a message to a few thousand people. Not being all that important I often find it hard to believe that a few thousand people will want to read what I have to say, so I don't do it all that often. I can see, however, that some scaling issues would come into play here. If I have to spend a few minutes sorting out duplicate replies every few weeks after posting something to the list, it's not a big deal. Besides, if I've taken the time to write something and send it to a few thousand people, I generally want to know what people have to say about it. But, never having posted to the NANOG list eight times in less than two days, I can only imagine how the time spent dealing with duplicate replies would add up. Besides, coming up with that many things worth sending to a few thousand people, in such a short period of time, must be really time consuming. With such a busy posting schedule, should we be surprised that the time to deal with an unfathomable quantity of duplicate responses would be hard to come by? -Steve On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr. wrote:
Paul Jakma wrote:
On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr. wrote:
Really? My responsibility to make sure you control your outbound mail. Got it.
You really think everyone on this list should remember the preference of every other poster as to whether they do or do not want a direct copy? Maybe we could have a list on a web page and everyone could check the list before replying to a post. That'd be really useful. But wait, seeing as how we've got these new-fangled computer thingies that can take care of drudgery for us, how about we provide a way to allow the poster to specify what their preference is, and then other people's computers could automatically use that preference!
Oh wait:
http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/822/28.htm
Someone already thought of that! In *1982*. Gosh, how prescient!
Or the document a little out-dated and replaced. But not your responsibility huh?
(sorry if the sarcasm is a little thick, but I groan and shake my head every time someone posts to NANOG about how people should please stop including them in list replies. When I see someone who usually has a modicum of clue do same I just have to reply. :) )
Oh. Any suggestions on how to do that using my mailer?
No idea, consult its documentation. I do ctrl+r in my MUA, in Netscape Communicator or Mozilla mail or Thunderbird you just add the address in a new field and click the drop down list and change the 'To' to 'Reply-To'
If your mailer can not do something as simple as allow you to specify the Reply-To, I suggest you upgrade to something that is at least half-decent.
And I'll delete the other copy you sent me for you.
That's another option I guess.
Where is RFC 2821 is this requirement, by the way? RFC 2822 says it is optional but seems to be less than useful in the context here.
Yes, of course Reply-To is optional. Absence of Reply-to indicates reply should go to sender.
regards,
-- Requiescas in pace o email
Ex turpi causa non oritur actio