Don't feed the troll...

[Ben Finney]

"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy at druid.net> writes:

> The answer is to always make sure that you include the previous poster
> in the reply as a Cc or To.

Dragging the discussion from one forum (comp.lang.python) to another
(every person's individual email) is obnoxious. Please don't.

> I have suggested this before but the push back I get is that then
> people would get two copies of the email, one to them and one to the
> list.

In my case, I don't want to receive the messages by email *at all*. I
participate in this forum using a non-email system, and it works fine so
long as people continue to participate in this forum.

Even for those who do participate by email, though, your approach is
broken:

> My answer is simple.  Get a proper email system that filters out
> duplicates.

The message sent to the individual typically arrives earlier (since it
is sent straight from you to the individual), and the message on the
forum arrives later (since it typically requires more processing).

But since we're participating in the discussion on the forum and not in
individual email, it is the later one we want, and the earlier one
should be deleted.

So at the point the first message arrives, it isn't a duplicate. The
mail program will show it anyway, because “remove duplicates” can't
catch it when there's no duplicate yet.

The proper solution is for you not to send that one at all, and send
only the message to the forum.

You do this by using your mail client's “reply to list” function, which
uses the RFC 3696 information in every mailing list message.

Is there any mail client which doesn't have this function? If so, use
your vendor's bug reporting system to request this feature as standard,
and/or switch to a better mail client until they fix that.

-- 
 \       “Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea |
  `\                                    of liberty.” —Thomas Jefferson |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney