Suggestion on Communications About Paper Distribution

[Koontz John E]

My apologies in advance for this post on list mechanics.

I'd suggest that communications responding to offers to distribute a copy
of a paper and similar matters should be handled off-list if possible.
This isn't any strict requirement, but I recommend it.  It reduces traffic
that might not interest others, and also reduces clutter in the permanent
archives of the list at www.linguistlist.org.  I don't have any way to
delete material from the archives easily, unfortunately, or I wouldn't
worry about the latter.

Incidentally, the managers of LinguistList have kindly deleted some
embarassing misposts for us by hand in the past.

Anyway, by default, letters from the list should cause simple replies that
you formulate to go to the list, though some mail client programs manage
to undo this scheme one way or another.  I've set things up this way to
encourage discourse.  Otherwise all replies would tend to go to the
original sender instead of to the subscribers at large, and that is a
recipe for a very quiet list indeed.

If you do actually want to conduct a side conversation (and handling the
mechanics of sending a copy of a peper would be a reasonable situation for
this), you'll need to make sure explicitly that your response is going to
the address of the original poster of the offer, rather than to the list.

It's always a good idea to look at the to-field of a letter anyway, as
that can save a lot of grief.