[Mailman-Users] The "right" way to reply to a mailing list

[Bill Christensen]

On 3/20/15 8:52 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:
> On 3/19/2015 6:47 PM, Lindsay Haisley <fmouse at fmp.com> wrote:
>> In many mail user agents, when you press the "Reply" button the program
>> will analyze the headers, determine that the post being replied to came
>> from a list and offer a "Reply to List" option in addition to a simple
>> reply, which generally goes privately to the original poster.
> I'd really like to know which email user agents really do this.
>
> In my experience, none of the ones used by 99+% of the worlds population
> actually use do this.
>
Thunderbird.  ('Reply to list' for listservs, 'Reply all' if more than 
one recipient in a non-list conversation)

Others like Gmail will offer 'reply all' if there's more than one 
recipient.

And what you get when you hit 'reply' will depend on what the list sets 
as the reply-to address.  In Mailman we have the option of setting it to 
the list address OR the sender.  Some of mine go to sender (typically 
lists whose participants tend to go far off topic frequently), some go 
to the list.

A couple of quick rules of thumb I use for responses:  If I can answer 
an original question definitively in one or two lines and it's not 
likely to spark a long thread, I will top post.

Otherwise, I most often use the trim-and-interleave, or if it makes 
sense (as in this post), bottom posting.   In general, follow the 
convention most used in the list or conversation in question.