Several people wrote.... I've had a fair amount of experience using (and setting up and running) quite a few mailing lists. The way they were always set up was the user sent to the list, and the list sent the mail back to all the subscribers with the reply address being the user who sent the post originally. In this manner if you hit the REPLY button to a post, your message goes to the person who sent the post, not the list. If you hit the REPLY ALL button, then your response went to the list AND the original poster. This is how 99.9% of all the lists I've ever seen are configured. As a result, I've always wondered why on classiccmp the reply address was the list. Using that method the benefit is that everyone can see what's going on. The drawback is it's very very easy to send posts intended to be private to the list. I'm not saying any of this to say how it should be set up. That's not my call. I'm just saying what I've typically seen on other lists. If Derek wants it changed to the old method, he can do it or he can call me to do it. I personally prefer the new way, but my vote doesn't count! :) Jay West

Several people wrote.... To which Philip replied... Anyone who wants the reply address mechanism changed should of course contact Derek. However, I strongly suggest that before anyone finalizes their mindset on this to please read the text page at the url that Philip provided above first. I've rarely seen a better argument made. There - that's my 2 cents worth <grin> I've always wondered why the list was set up the way it was. It could be the mail software that Derek had available to use, which is not the same as the mailing list software he's got now. Or perhaps there was a concious decision to do it that way on his part or the part of the list community as a whole. As a relative newbie to the list, I have no idea. Just some random thoughts... Jay West

Sellam wrote: Yes to everything! I just got home, and found that with the machine I use at home that this is even more of a royal pain! It looks like Eudora Pro doesn't have a group reply. I thought this was a pain in the neck with 'elm', and yes, multiple people have pointed out "Group Reply", but I don't consider sending the person who's message I'm replying to, two copies acceptable behavior! I know *I* don't want two copies everytime someone replies to something I wrote. Here is something else to consider, there have got to be list members that have to pay *PER MINUTE* connection fees (remember those? *I* sure do). You do a group reply to those folks, you're costing them money! Then there is the disk space and bandwidth wasted by two messages. Oh, and yes, these are a couple of the reasons that I get a more than a little irritated with non-ASCII email and binary attachments! Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

That is rude and foolish. It's damm annoying to have to tell pine which to send to as it take this config and puts classiccmp as the CC: and the poster as the TO:. On a telnet link that trivial edit is really slow. I do know how to run a mail client and I happen to run some odd ones for my reasons. Pine can sort out the mess some but I access my ISP via a telnet connection from the work isp. So happens the work ISP is really poor and while I have a reliable 21.6k connection if I back up to edit the screen updates seem to suddenly take MINUTES, no exaduration. To back the cursor up it literally worse than editing on an old asr33!. If you know how to speed that up I'm all ears. Oh, I have to use telnet as MY ISP is in a different state and the only local access that would not use telnet is 25miles away as a long distance call. Now at home I run under W3.1 and use a nonwinsock based mailer (RFDmail) as its fast and worked with the unix shell account I have. It happens to not have group reply or the ability to sort out multiple from fields. Ok, you call that broken but it does move a meg of mail faster than Eudora or (gagme) netscape-mail and it's kin. I dont have to wait for trumpet winsock to wind up first either. The payback, ALL emailable viruses/trojans/worms are ineffective and can be safely recieved! Allison

On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Rich Lafferty wrote: Rich, this is hardly constructive. So because you got a wild hair up your arse and decided to get nasty, I replied to you seven additional times with this message, including the one going out to the list. Enjoy! Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking for a six in a pile of nines... VCF East? VCF Europe!? YOU BETCHA!! Stay tuned for more information or contact me to find out how you can participate http://www.vintage.org

On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Bill Dawson wrote: The problem here is diversity of mail clients. Not all allow you to simply delete the individual's address and be done with it. PINE, for instance (what I currently use) requires me to cut the classiccmp address the To: line. You are looking at it from your (somewhat limited) perspective. You probably use a GUI-based e-mail client. I don't. Like many others, I prefer to use a text-based mail reader over a telnet connection because I'm old school and damn proud of it. In fact, a lot of people subscribed to this list are naturally old school, and naturally are using older systems without all the fancy editing features your mail reader apparently does. In fact, that's what this list is all about: old school people using old school systems to talk about old school computers. That being the case, the list should cater to us old schoolers. It should also: * Conform to the RFC * Be conducive to a PUBLIC discussion that can be archived for posterity * Not send out more replies than are required, thus annoying people <...> Well, I've pretty much laid out very logical reasons to revert to the old method, which I've reiterated above. Perhaps you need to read a little further into the discussion. Quite frankly, I don't care how it turns out because I'm only subscribed by virtue of the fact that I was a subscribed (but inactive) member of the old list. I'm just still trying to figure out a way to stop the messages from coming to me without having to unsubscribe. If I have to unsubscribe to make this happen, then I'll probably not want to go through the trouble of re-subscribing just to post a quick message say "This person has this hardware..." and then having to unsubscribe again. SO I guess what I'm saying is, this software sucks and has caused nothing but grief for all involved, so let's just go back to the old list processing software that u.washington.edu was using. Screw MajorDomo. I don't even like that name. What the fork is a MajorDomo anyway? Screw MajorDomo, it's developer, and the boat that person came in on. Once would, but look at what we've mainly talked about since the list became active again. We're a wacky bunch. Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking for a six in a pile of nines... VCF Europe: April 29th & 30th, Munich, Germany VCF Los Angeles: Summer 2000 (*TENTATIVE*) VCF East: Planning in Progress See http://www.vintage.org for details!

On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Bill Dawson wrote: I don't understand where this is coming from. The previous method enabled one to: a) reply to the list or b) reply to the sender only And again, why would one want to reply to both the sender AND the list? Assuming the sender is a member of the list (99% of the time they are) they are going to get the message anyway. I hate it when I get two replies to the same message because someone was too lazy to edit the headers of a poorly configured list. The benefits of a list like this is that it is a public forum; it's like a bunch of geeks in a big circle jabbering to each other. That's what gives this list its unique character and usefulness. Change it back. Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking for a six in a pile of nines... VCF East? VCF Europe!? YOU BETCHA!! Stay tuned for more information or contact me to find out how you can participate http://www.vintage.org

And while we are on the topic of the list server, is it possible to have a common date stamp put on all messages that are sent out from the listserver? One of the major pains I have is when messages come in from different time zones, and this ^%$^&$ software (Netscape Mail) sorts the damn stuff by date without the option of not sorting. Among other reasons, a common date stamp makes it FAR easier to keep track of who might be responding to something first. Sorry Mike for sending the message to you personally earlier; I ***REALLY DISLIKE*** the way the Reply is set up now. With almost everything I send going out to the list, this new method is a major pain as well as a waste of time having to deal with the *&%^$ headers on every message sent to the list. Mike Ford wrote:

Well from pine via telnet the current way means marvin just got two copies and I don't plan to edit the message as it too damm slow. The mailer at home seems to be an oddbal and has no reply to all and the from: address it will use is the first or last(have to look) in the header. In the end the most visible address is the one I'm likely to reply to by error. Oh, and I really hate getting things twice, NetBSD-Port-VAX is dont this way and I get anything I reply to and their replys at least twice. Another pet peeve, posts/replies in html, I don't read them and dump them sumarily as A) they are often spam, B)the are a pain to handle via said slow telnet and pine. Oh, I have no plans for IE or any other browser based mail and really don't want to use MS OS if I can avoid it. So that rather limits what some consider a decent mailer. Allison

It was thus said that the Great liste(a)artware.qc.ca once stated (and will get two copies of this): And the rebuttle: http://www.metasystema.org/reply-to-useful.mhtml I personally like Reply-To: set to the mailing list. All the lists I'm on are set up that way and there have been no problems that I could see (yes, you see the occasional private message sent but it's not that big a problem). -spc (I get enough mail as it is ... I don't need duplicates 8-)

It was thus said that the Great Rich Lafferty once stated: Because in this case, it's the Right Thing (TM). Honestly, just how often is your case even relevant? I subscribe from an account I can't read mail http://www.unicom.com/BBS/bbs_forum.cgi?forum=replyto&read=000038-00000… 1: The person must be sending from an account that s/eh cannot recieve mail from. While this may have been true in the past, in most cases people are reading/sending mail from the account they want the mail go to. In the 7 years I've been using email and the 2 years of working at an ISP I have only seen the reply-to used twice. Both times it was because a person was switching to a new account and wanted an effective way to get people in the habit of sending to the new address. In such cases the mailing lists are usually the first to move to the new address. Aside from a 1-2 day overlap, there really is no danger of missing any mail. And then there's http://www.unicom.com/BBS/bbs_forum.cgi?forum=replyto&read=000058-00000… I found your site because someone posted the URL on the video4linux list, I by myself run a large site with 70 mailing-lists with over 15'000 subscribers. To be blunt, I think your page is useless with the exception to give you feedback from the "real" world. I wrote my list-software using procmail and perl-scripts to handle bounces, archiving and email-header settings, I provide the functionality, and list-operators who run the lists can decide whether they want reply-to set to the list or the sender ... by default it's back to the sender ... and 95% of all lists the *users* request me to set reply-to the list, because sender are flooded with replies which are meant for the list, and they end up forwarding them all. As comparison, we have 3'000 incomings email per day, and running them for four years I had to remove 4 emails from the archives because people accidently assumed the reply would go to the sender and not list itself. But not content with that, I decided to ACTUALLY READ RFC-822 and see what it says about this whole mess: 4.4.3. REPLY-TO / RESENT-REPLY-TO This field provides a general mechanism for indicating any mailbox(es) to which responses are to be sent. Three typical uses for this feature can be distinguished. In the first case, the author(s) may not have regular machine-based mail- boxes and therefore wish(es) to indicate an alternate machine address. In the second case, an author may wish additional persons to be made aware of, or responsible for, replies. A (emphasis mine). And that, I think ends this discussion. -spc (I can't figure out why anyone hasn't read the RFC until now ... 8-)

Upon the date 04:55 PM 2/3/00 -0500, Bill Dawson said something like: -- snip -- This is now the way I feel too Bill. I see the light: An important technical discussion kept private will not benefit the group as a whole nor benefit those researchers (ourselves and others) who try to find answers I feel the *OLD* way is preferable. We just gotta keep in mind that a reply intended to be private will automatically go to the whole list as it always had been before now. That's about the only significant problem with having an open forum as the old ClassicCmp setup had been. It would also relieve some of the significant problems that folks like Tony, Allison, et al. have just started having. I may even want to try using Pine or try telneting or try something else "classic" someday myself. It's true classic computer operation in a sense as opposed to this windoze stuff. Regards, Chris -- -- Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian Jamestown, NY USA cfandt(a)netsync.net Member of Antique Wireless Association URL: http://www.antiquewireless.org/

On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Rich Lafferty wrote: Well, hmmm. Since you are obviously are subscribed to the list, and you obviously read the messages coming from the list, then that implies that replies going back to the mailbox from which you read the list will in fact reach you. So I guess what I'm saying is I don't understand your scenario. A little more specifics might help. Change always pisses people off (especially when it wasn't particularly broken in the first place). Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking for a six in a pile of nines... VCF East? VCF Europe!? YOU BETCHA!! Stay tuned for more information or contact me to find out how you can participate http://www.vintage.org

Jerome Fine replies: Thanks to Jay and Derek from this list member as well. What ever you two or the others decide is fine with me.

Hi All I'm looking for tiny basic on the 6502. I'll take listings, binary, S format, Hex, PROMs or what ever. Thanks Dwight

Might mean 'hello', of course I'm sitting in Aloha, as I type this :^) Zane