Procedural Comments

[Koontz John E]

If you are sending a response to the list, it is not necessary to also
send it to the author of the posting you are responding to.  They will
receive a copy automatically, because they are subscribed to the list.
You might want to cc any off-list parties who have been included in an
exchange, especally if you included them yourself.

My impression is that most people who regularly respond both to the list
and to the sender of a posting on the list are being ambushed by a
feature of their mailer, but I thought I'd mention it in passing.

By intention the list is set up so that responses will go to the list if
you do the default pattern of reply.  You should have to take special
steps to send an off-list or side response only to the poster.  However,
some mailer utilities are set up to circumvent this scheme.  They either
redirect the response to the poster, rather than the list, or they manage
to arrange the headers of constributions so that in spite of ListProc's
best efforts any response to that letter will go back to the original
poster and not the list.  It is probably possible configure most mailers
not to do this, but the process may be infinitely complex.

So far, the only solution to these various problems that I know of is
vigilence.  It never hurts to check to see who you are actually sending a
letter to before you send it.  I know some very sad stories about missent
email.  Unfortunately it's very easy to get into the habit of assuming
that things are working as expected, because normally they do!

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz