How to get best results from FreeBSD-questions

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 10 January 2004 at 12:01:26 +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 03:48:12AM -0800, Loren M. Lang wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 05:02:01PM -0800, Greg Lehey wrote:
>>> 6.  Unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, reply to the sender
>>>     and to FreeBSD-questions.  Many people on the FreeBSD-questions
>>>     are "lurkers": they learn by reading messages sent and replied to
>>>     by others.  If you take a message which is of general interest off
>>>     the list, you're depriving these people of their information.  Be
>>>     careful with group replies; lots of people send messages with
>>>     hundreds of CCs.  If this is the case, be sure to trim the Cc:
>>>     lines appropriately.
>
>> Hmmm...  seems like I remember this as a big no-no on some other list,
>> as it stated that most people who submitted messages were probably also
>> subscribed, and it was an irritation to them to see duplicates to all
>> the replies.  I know I am slightly annoyed when I see that, but only
>> slightly.  It finished saying that anyone who wanted a personal reply to
>> state so, but if they didn't, I'd hate not knowing if they received my
>> reply just because I assumed they were subscribed.
>
> FreeBSD-questions is a special case: as it's the most prominently
> advertised support contact point, the expectation is that a large
> fraction of the participants won't be members of the list.  It's also
> the case that we want answers to go to the list, as then the list
> archives form a kind of knowledge-base whereby people can help
> themselves.

I think that Loren was suggesting "just reply to the list".  The
paragraph above doesn't address that issue, and maybe it should.
The rationale here is that many people, myself included, routinely
discard most mailing list mail unread.  If, however, it's a followup
to something I wrote, I want to see it.  If it's addressed to me as
well, mutt will flag it and I'll see it.

> Now that the FreeBSD lists are managed using Mailman, you have the
> option not to receive any message to a mailing list where your
> address is already listed in the To: or CC: headers.  I think it's
> set to "Yes" by default.

Hmm, the only thing I know there is the "Receive posts you send to the
list" option, which isn't quite the same.  FWIW, I use procmail, which
can catch duplicate messages.  Just put this in your .procmailrc:

  # Avoid messages with duplicate Message-ID
  :0 W: msgid.lock
  | formail -D 65536 msgid.cache

Greg
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