At 01:11 PM 6/4/2011, Jonathan Edwards wrote:
>One question off topic - when replying to this list, what is standard
>protocol - "reply-all" - seems like then the person who posted last get's
>two copies - one to them and one to the list (which also goes to them)

I personally encourage public replies to most queries; otherwise
nobody knows whether a question's been taken care of.  In my personal
capacity my ratio of public to private replies is probably 5:1 or
better.  I may make both public and private replies to a query,
either in parallel or mixed in a thread.  Usually the private ones
are either because of an existing relationship or to avoid what I see
as a potential for embarrassing someone.*

Reply-All is the easy way to do that, and yes, unless gmail is
deciding what's best for you <grrr>** you'll get two copies if
someone answers your post that way.  Some people find that
annoying.  Personally, before gmail started swiping them out from
under me I found it a valuable way to be reminded whether I'd gotten
a public or private reply.

There's an alternate view that most replies should be private to
avoid cluttering up the list.  I disagree quite firmly with that viewpoint.

*In our moderating Ben and I started mostly private but found that
for this list mostly public seems to work better.

**For possible interest - I use gmail as a portable mail-caching
system.  My attglobal address forwards to gmail.  I can download from
their POP servers and send mail through their SMTP servers from
anywhere in the known universe.  I never visit the website except to
look in my spam folder, and I never ever see one of their ads.  I use
Eudora for mail, but it would work just as well with Outlook or
Thunderbird or whatever.

Three little snags: their spam filtering is a bit too aggressive,
they make decisions on my behalf about duplicate messages that I wish
they wouldn't (another example: since my messages to the list go out
through them, they suppress the incoming copy so I had to SET VANAGON
VERIFY on the listserv to be sure that my priceless gems actually
make it to the list), and their outgoing servers put headers on my
mail such that some replies will be addressed to the gmail address
instead of the attglobal one.  In compensation it lets me deal with a
large volume of email (several hundred a day from around thirty
mailing lists/yahoo groups), get and send mail on my laptop from
anywhere without losing concurrency, and be away from access for long
periods if necessary without worries about overflowing my ISP's
mailbox allowance.

Yours,
d mod