Date:         Fri, 29 Jun 2001 08:52:21 -0700
Reply-To:     DaveC <voicebox@DNAI.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         DaveC <voicebox@DNAI.COM>
Subject:      ** PLEASE READ ** Change the List's Reply-To address
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

Hello,
OK, I just gotta say something, here.

For most posts I send to the List, I'm getting multiple "replies"
sent to me rather than the List. (Due to the wording of these
messages, I'm sure they were meant to go to the List, not to me
directly.) I'm sure that I'm not the only one who gets "public"
messages sent to them rather than to the List.

In fairness to those persons from whom I received messages, I, too,
mistakenly sent posts to members that I meant to send to the List. In
all, a 80% error rate! I know it's a small sample, but geees! How
many others on the list mistakenly have sent or received messages
that were meant to be posted to the List? Quite a few, I'd bet.

And here's the reason why:

The Reply-To address for this List is set to be the individual
poster's address, not the List address.

So, whenever a person selects Reply from their e-mail program (as we
all know), the message is not addressed to the List, but to the
individual who posted the message. To avoid erroneously sending posts
to individuals, each poster must manually change the Reply-To address
for every reply.

This mis-direction of messages is something that, if one applies
oneself, he/she could overcome this problem. But who wants to have to
try to remember this each and every time he/she composes a message to
the VANAGON list? And then you've always got the newcomers who don't
expect this to be this way (all other lists I belong to have the LIST
address as the reply-to address).

The current process of replying to List postings is tedious and
error-prone. I suggest that the Reply-To address be changed to <
vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM >.

I am a member of several lists, and this is the only one that doesn't
have a Reply-To address that is the List address.

I assume that the reason the Reply-To address is set to be the
individual poster's address is to avoid replies being posted to the
List that are meant to be private. But think about this: how many
times do you send a message to an individual list member, and how
many times do you post to the List? In other words, the number of
time you might mean to send a private message to a list member and
mistakenly post it to the List has a *much* less chance of happening
than the opposite occurring (simply because we post to the list more
often than we reply privately to list members).

Sincerely,
Dave Carpenter
--
Dave Carpenter

Whatever you wish for me,
May you have twice as much.