SEELANGS Administrivia - List name in Subject line

[Alex Rudd]

Dear SEELangers,

I'm writing to announce a (very) small change to the SEELANGS list.

As most of you are aware, subscribers to this list are encouraged
to send personal messages off-list.  In other words, if a message is
really intended only for one person, then it should be sent directly
to that person and not to the entire list.  Often, while reading a
message posted to SEELANGS, someone will simply click on "Reply" to
reply to the message, intending to respond only to the sender, and
not realizing that the reply (by default) is headed back to the entire
list.

As I've mentioned here before, the default "Reply-To:" tag in all
messages posted to SEELANGS contains the list address.  That just
means that if all you do is reply to the message, without doing
anything else, your reply will be sent back to the list address and
distributed to all the subscribers.  The list is configured that way
because it is a discussion list.  We want to encourage discussion and
we want everyone to benefit from the knowledge being shared.

Well, every so often someone makes a mistake and sends a personal
reply back to the list address.  Such errors are then often compounded
by the posting of a follow-up apology.

Although there is a notice about the problem in the Welcome message,
and although I've posted to the list about it, too, it still happens.
It's not the end of the world, but I began to think about other ways
in which to solve the problem.

To solve a problem like this, the place to start is understanding why
such mistakes happen.  I believe the crux of the problem here is that
most people these days use an e-mail program that, when displaying a
newly-arrived message, shows the message's "Subject:" line and also
shows who sent it.  With a discussion list like SEELANGS, there are
actually two senders -- the "From:" line contains the address of the
individual who posted the message and the "Sender:" line contains the
list address.  The e-mail program, though, has room for only one of
those senders, and chooses to display the individual's name and/or
address rather than the list address.  Consequently, when looking at
newly-arrived messages listed in his or her e-mail program, the
average list member may not have any way of knowing at first that
a given message was sent via SEELANGS or not.

In my opinion, there are two reasonable ways in which to attack
this problem.  I have control only over the first, but I'll explain
the second below as well.

Here's the first:  To alert everyone to the fact that a newly-
arrived message was distributed via SEELANGS, without the need to
open it and read it, I'm going to instruct LISTSERV to insert the
list name, SEELANGS, enclosed in brackets, at the very beginning
of each "Subject:" line.  That's all.

For the LISTSERV-savvy among you, what I'm really doing is changing
all subscribers' subscription options to SUBJECTHDR and making that
a default for all new subscribers.

Please note:
  - You DO NOT HAVE TO ADD THE LIST NAME to "Subject:" lines when
    you post.  LISTSERV will take care of it automatically.

Also note that all this solution really does is alert you to a
message's origin.  If you want your reply to go only to the person
who posted the message and not back to the entire list, you STILL
HAVE TO MAKE SURE YOU'VE GOT THE CORRECT ADDRESSEE selected before
clicking on "Send."

I said I'd mention a second way in which to attack this problem.
Here it is.  Most of you, whether you know it or not, use an e-mail
program that allows you to filter incoming messages according to
filtering criteria that you designate.  You can then instruct the
program to receive new messages directly into a separate folder.
So, you could create a folder in your e-mail program called SEELANGS,
and, because every message posted to the list arrives with a "To:"
address of SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU, you could set up a filter to
take every new message whose "To:" address is SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
and put it directly into your SEELANGS folder.  That way, you'd never
get confused about what was a list message and what was a personal
message.

Unfortunately, because there are so many e-mail programs in use out
there, I can't tell you how to set this up, but you could probably
figure it out for yourself by consulting your e-mail program's Help
file or documentation or by asking a tech support person at your
institution or Internet Service Provider.

Finally, I'd like to acknowledge list member Loren Billings, whose
gentle nudging pushed me to come up with this solution.  Time will
tell how effective it is.

Oh, and if you make the same mistake in the future and post a personal
reply to the whole list, don't worry too much about it, and please
do NOT post a follow-up apology.  Such messages just take up room
unnecessarily on our archive disk.  Instead, you can write to us list
owners at SEELANGS-Request at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU to let us know that you
know what you did, so we don't have to take the time to advise you.

Any questions, please let me know off-list.

Thanks.

- Alex, list owner of SEELANGS    seelangs-request at listserv.cuny.edu
....................................................................
Alex Rudd                ahrjj at cunyvm.cuny.edu            ARS KA2ZOO
{Standard Disclaimer}    http://home.attbi.com/~lists/seelangs/

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