[pianotech] new list features

Andy Rudoff andy@rudoff.com
Tue, 10 Sep 2002 15:30:04 -0600 (MDT)


[Phil Ford asks...]
>Now, when I reply to a pianotech e-mail, it sometimes wants to reply to the
>list and sometimes wants to reply to the sender, and sometimes to both?  Have
>others experienced this?

This is always a difficult issue since the mail readers all work
a bit differently.  The current thinking on mailing lists is that
replies should go back to the sender and if you want it to go back
to the entire list you should use the "reply all" button.  But you
may notice that our list doesn't work that way.  That's because our
list has been around for a long time and back when it started the
current thinking was that replies should go to the entire list.

Since we had a history of it working that way, I tried to keep it
that way, so that replies go back to the entire list.  This is
done through a feature called "Reply-To munging" and it has to do
with fiddling with the "Reply-To" header in the outgoing messages.
Some of you may see these headers, some of you may have them hidden
by your mail readers.

If you are seeing different behavior when you reply than you did before
yesterday, it is probably some subtle way the new list software munges
the Reply-To header as compared to the old way.  I know it is annoying
when these little details change, and i did my best to keep it the same,
but it sounds like there are some details that don't exactly match the
way majordomo did it.  Let's try it this way for a while and if we get
lots of mis-sent posts we can try it without the Reply-To munging.  But
I'm not very keen to trying hacking majordomo's behavior into the new
software since the developer community seems to have decided that
majordomo had it wrong.

>When I hit reply I get Re: [pianotech] Whatever Subject.  I'm confused as to
>whether I should leave this [pianotech] in there or not, because the server
>may stick another one on in front of it, so that they start piling up, if you
>see what I mean.

Good question.  The list software is supposed to realize that the
"[pianotech]" is already there, so they shouldn't pile up.  However,
I noticed earlier that some Subject lines had:
	Re: [pianotech] text
while others had:
	[pianotech] Re: text
and that seems weird.  I added it to my list of things to look into.

-andy


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