On 17/10/2008, at 13.20, Bill Moran wrote:
In response to "Mikkel Høgh" <mikkel@xxxxxxxxx>:On 17/10/2008, at 12.24, Tomasz Ostrowski wrote: But again, how often do you want to give a personal reply only? That is a valid use-case, but I'd say amongst the hundreds of mailing-list replies I've written over the years, only two or three were not sent back to the mailing list.You're forgetting the cost of a mistake in that case. As it stands, if you hit reply when you meant reply-to, oops, resend.If it's changed and you hit reply when you want to send a private messageto the poster, you just broadcast your private message to the world.
And again, how often does this happen? How often do people write really sensitive e-mails based on messages on pgsql-general.
Because if we wanted to be really safe, we should not even send the mailing-list address along, so even if someone used the reply-all button, he could not accidentally post his private e-mail on the web.
In true McDonalds-style, we could change the mailing-list-address to be pgsql-general-if-you-send-to-this-your-private-information-will-be-posted-on-the-internet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
How far are you willing to go to protect people against themselves?
Yay, even more manual labour instead of having the computers doing thework for us. What's your next suggestion, go back to pen and paper?Don't be an asshole. There's no need for that kind of cynicism.
In my opinion, asking for sane defaults is neither cynicism or being an asshole. I may have put it on an edge, but having to manually add a Reply-To header to each message I send to pgsql-general is not my idea of fun.
Well, my point is that Reply-To: is only dangerous if you're not careful. Not so with the other examples you mention :)But as it is now, it's not dangerous at all.
No, just annoying and a waste of time, energy, bandwidth and ultimately, money.
If you're writing something important, private and/or confidential, don't you always check before you send? You'd better, because a small typo when you selected the recipient might mean that you're sending love-letters to your boss or something like that :)I'd rather know that the computer had my back in the case of an error,instead of it helping me mindlessly even when I'm doing the wrong thing.To me, that's also the difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Well, in the above case, the computer doesn't have your back. If you told it to send the e-mail to Marty Boss instead of Maggie Blond, that's exactly what it'll do.
Currently, when I tell my computer to reply to a message on the pgsql mailing list, it'll do something else, because who ever set it up decided to cater to the 0.1% edge-case instead of just having the default action be what it should be 99.5% of the time.
You may not care about usability or user experience, but remember that what seems to be correct from a technical perpective is not always the "right" thing to do.
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