Reply to whom? (was: Efficient Wrappers for Instance Methods)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 4 Feb 2016 08:50 am, Ben Finney wrote:

> (You will also have a “reply to all” command. That's almost never
> appropriate in a forum like this.)

If your mail client lacks Reply To List, use Reply All and then manually
edit the To addresses of the new message. It honestly isn't hard, I've been
doing it for years. It's four simple steps, and one complicated one:


(1) Hit Reply All. You will[*] get a new email with headers (e.g.):

To: The Sender <fred at nurks.org>
CC: Mailing List <complaints at petshop.com>


(2) Edit your reply. This is the hard part, since you actually have to think
about what you are doing.

(3) Edit the CC header line, and CUT (not copy) the mailing list address.

(4) Edit the To header line, delete the current contents, and PASTE the
mailing list address.

At this point you now have headers:

To: Mailing List <complaints at petshop.com>
CC: <blank>


(5) Hit Send.



If your email software doesn't make this *trivially* easy, then your email
software sucks. I don't care if it's on your mobile phone, or your
microwave oven for that matter. If it is hard for you to change the To
address, oh well, so sad, it sucks to be you. Perhaps you should wait until
you can sit down at a desktop, laptop or even tablet before replying.

If you (generic you) don't make the effort, and choose to send out the email
with messed up To/CC headers, don't blame your lousy email client, or think
that "Sorry, I'm on my phone" is an excuse. You're choosing to put your
convenience ahead of that of the potentially thousands of others on the
mailing list, so be honest about it: "I'm just being lazy. I won't adapt to
the way everyone else works, so you can adapt to me and my crap tools."




[*] With one exception: if the sender is sending via Yahoo, and possibly AOL
(if there is anyone on AOL who knows how to send email). Yahoo and AOL do
not interact well with mailing lists. As they say on the mailman mailing
list, "Friends don't let friends use Yahoo email addresses."


-- 
Steven