[sharp-discuss] question on mir phasing

Peter Keller pkeller at globalphasing.com
Fri May 28 11:18:25 CEST 2010


Dear Francis,

On Fri, 28 May 2010, Clemens Vonrhein wrote:

>> P.S. the Reply-To: field for sharp-discuss defaults to the sender, it
>> would be useful for the replies to head back to the list so those of us
>> who are simply 'watching' can listen in and hopefully learn something.
>
> Yes(ish): the logic here is that we don't want people accidentially
> reply to the whole group if they only want to reply to a single
> person. I think that is the same default as e.g. for CCP4bb? One might
> always use the group-reply feature of the email client to get the
> reply to list and sender ...

Yes, this is a much-discussed issue, see e.g. 
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

The point is that if someone makes a mistake when replying to a mailing list 
message, it can be very serious and embarrasing to reply to the whole list 
when the reply is intended for the original sender only, and once the reply 
has been sent it is hard or impossible to get it back (and I have seen some 
very embarrasing cases, believe me!).

Replying in error to the sender only instead of the whole list is mild by 
comparison. Either the sender or the replier could still forward the message 
to the whole list so that everyone sees it, if follow-ups don't contain 
enough quoted context.

Regards,
Peter.

-- 
Peter Keller                                     Tel.: +44 (0)1223 353033
Global Phasing Ltd.,                             Fax.: +44 (0)1223 366889
Sheraton House,
Castle Park,
Cambridge CB3 0AX
United Kingdom


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