On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Scott Raun wrote: > 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 In some sense "it worked" but it might have worked better if they had not done it that way. When replies go to the sender and are compiled by the sender, he might find that he gets 10 identical replies. That means that 9 people wasted their time and they would not have wasted their time if the first person had sent his reply to the list. Another defect in that system is that list readers don't see the replies until they are posted by the interrogator. Once they've see them, they may add some improvements/corrections/etc. Thus, the compiled response is not the last word. Some people might withhold their reply until they've seen some of the others. Yet another defect in that system is that people might not reply because they think someone else must have replied. If replies go to the list, we know what has been said and we know if we have something to add. I think reply to list is much better and we should stick with it. I'm not sure what has changed here. I use pine, I reply to all, and then snip out addresses I don't want to send to. It seems like I do this same thing on most every list. Best, Mike -- Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Division of Epidemiology and Community Health and Institute of Human Genetics University of Minnesota http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/