Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: qemu-devel now defaults to reply-to "poster"

[Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>]

François Revol wrote:
> I thought the purpose of a mailing list was to handle the *list* of
> people to **mail* to automatically... looks like offloading to humans
> back...

Nice idea.

But it only works for low traffic lists and people who are not busy.

Your idea of a mailing list doesn't work for people who don't have
time to read the whole list, but who it's important to involve in
specific threads.

For example, someone reporting a bug should see the replies to their
specific report, but often they won't have time to check the whole
list every day for replies.  Same for things which touch subsystems
with specific maintainers.

Cc lets you make sure specific people are involved in specific
threads.  Nobody's created a mailing-list header
"X-This-Message-Is-Important-To-The-Following-People:" which you'd
need otherwise.

Cc does that job, and if you have a good mail setup then you don't see
the message twice, it just flags it as important to the named people.

Which is why most development lists use group-reply and Cc, and many
where it's not important (such as chat lists) use list-reply.

-- Jamie