[Bioperl-l] Changing default reply-to on this list

[Roy Chaudhuri]

> I'd like to propose changing the default reply-to for posts on this list 
> from the current 'reply to the poster' to 'reply to the mailing list'. 
> That way people can just hit 'reply' instead of 'reply to all' in order 
> to get a reply back to the list.

We did this on our mailing list, and found it to be problematic if the 
messages still appear to come from an individual rather than the list- 
people may not realise they are replying to the whole list. This can 
lead to all sorts of issues- my boss and a collaborator once had a 
discussion (fortunately nothing too sensitive) that was accidentally 
copied to everyone in their field. The alternative is to overwrite the 
from: field as well as reply-to:, but then you rely on people having 
suitably informative signatures should anyone want to contact them 
off-list, and it makes the archives less useful.

See also this:
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

Maybe you could tag a reminder to reply-all on every list message?

Roy.
--
Dr. Roy Chaudhuri
Bioinformatics Research Fellow
Division of Immunity and Infection
University of Birmingham, U.K.

http://xbase.bham.ac.uk