On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 01:34:55PM -0600, Nate Carlson wrote: > My view on this has always been that if you're replying to a message > posted to the list, the default behavior should be for your reply to > go back to the mailing list; if you want to change that behavior, > you'll have to do something different. It's always seemed perfectly > obvious to me.. For the most part, I agree. I can expand on this a little - let's take the question out of the technical arena and into the social. What is the goal of the list? To help maintain community cohesiveness, or disseminate information? If the role is community, the all replies going to the list by default is good behavior. It's kind of like being at a party - if you want to have a private discussion there, you have to go through extra work to have it. If a list is part of - or maybe _is_ - the community, and exists to help keep the community together, replies go to it. If the role is purely informational, then replying to the original sender can be a preferred option. A friend of mine told me of the one list he knew of where reply-to-sender actually worked - it was a high-volume OS list (Sun, IIRC), where the tradition was: 1) Ask a question 2) Everyone with input replies directly to you 3) After you've gotten a bunch of answers, you summarize the answers, and explain what worked for you, in a follow-up message If I join an mailing list, it's because I want to be part of that community. Why should we make participating in the community more difficult or onerous? FWIW, I use mutt, mutt knows this is a list - so, I hit R for reply, go 'grrr', cancel the message, and THEN hit L for list-reply. I would prefer Reply-To be set to the list - R goes to the list, if I want the individual, I hit N and mutt pops up with the original sender. -- Scott Raun sraun at fireopal.org