[META] The issue of the unwelcome CC (please email me if you receive a CC from me)

[Daniel Farina]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:26:07 -0500
> Christopher J. Walters articulated:
>
>> It was my understanding that this bug had been fixed in Thunderbird,
>> but I may be mistaken.  I know that in a GNU/Linux user mailing list
>> I have long been signed up for, I will occasionally receive CC's not
>> for replies to my own messages, but for replies where the poster's
>> To: line is to the person to whom they are replying and the message
>> is CC'ed to the list.
>
> I have encounter two individuals, not on this list, who also think it
> is cute to mail a response directly to the OP and then CC the list.
> Honestly, some people are alive only because it seems cruel to kill a
> retard.

Okay, the harshness of language here has baited me to reply:

There's a simple reason people do this, and it's because it is a
common choice for large lists, including the Linux family of mailing
lists, the Postgres family of mailing lists, and the FreeBSD family of
mailing lists, and the GCC mailing lists -- and these are the first
four projects I thought of, all of which use the "To: OP, CC: The
List" convention.  The common (and entirely valid) use case being that
one can filter for mail that is "To:" them, and not necessarily read
*all* mailing list traffic.

gnupg-users has a Reply-To convention that is an outlier in that crowd
of mailing lists. Were I someone who was expected to respond to mail
on this list frequently and the list was of higher volume, I'd find it
very frustrating.  Nevertheless, it's fine that gnupg-users has its
own way of dealing with this, but as long as it is an outlier in this
respect, you are going to get the occasional email addressed in this
way, from people who otherwise think that somehow the 'reply' fields
were actually filled in in error.

Also, Message-Id.  Getting two copies should be a non-problem.

--
fdr