[plug] Re: Noise!

[John Summerfield]

On Fri, 7 Aug 1998, Christian wrote:

> 
> I'm all in favour of changing the Reply-to field to the originator of the
> email and not the list.  Damion points out that this will prevent the rest

I pointed it it. Damion agreed. I think it's a bad idea, especially for
such a small list.

> of the people on the list learning the result of the discussion but I think
> the loss of information through changing the reply-to address will be
> minimal.  Certainly not as much as will be lost eventually when everyone is
> throwing emails left, right and centre and no one can obtain the signal
> from the noise.  All changing the address field will do is force people to
> consciously think "Does the rest of the list need to know about this or is
> it possible they would benefit?" and this is definitely a good thing.  And
> if you read my original email, it's one of the things I said then too.


I very much doubt that many missives are of more than passing interest to
many people. I think the mark would be nearer ten percent. How can anyone
except me judge what's useful to me?

I gather we have some very experienced ISP types, some almost complete
beginners, some between.

I often find that even very knowledgable people don't read the question
properly and so give a misleading or quite wrong answer. If such an error
is directed to the list, those of you who are the professional Linux users
can take the time to set the record straight so that the originator of the
question isn't mislead (at least, not for long) and the person who gave
the inaccurate answer can learn too. 

I remember on another list (dealing with OS/2), one thread wandered of
into the prehistory of personal computing, even going back to CP/M.

Judging from the number of contributions, quite a few people followed and
enjoyed the thread even though it had absolutely nothing to do with OS/2. 




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