That's not what a mailing list is. What you are describing is an email message with multiple recipients, not a mailing list. Mailing lists don't include the email addresses of all of the recipients in the distributed messages To or CC fields, and the From and Reply-to is the address of the mailing list, never a list of all users on the mailing list.
Mailing lists are centrally managed, and have a "reflector" or central distribution point (what you call a "robot") which maintains the email addresses of all the people on the mailing list. In order to add or remove yourself to the mailing list, you typically have to send a message to name-of-mailing-list-REQUEST, not to the whole mailing list of course. Now days there are usually web pages that people can use to subscribe and unsubscribe and view the archives, and which the administrator can use to moderate messages, but in the old days the moderator was a human and administered the list via email. To save bandwidth (in the days that it mattered, i.e. over the slow ARPANET and over international connections and expensive dial up modems) there would be redistribution lists for regions and organizations, which users or local administrators would have to manage themselves (or the central administrator would have to forward requests to the redistribution list administrator), so only one copy of the message had to be sent to each redistribution list.
An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or customers, but typically refers to four things:
1) a list of email addresses,
2) the people ("subscribers") receiving mail at those addresses,
3) the publications (email messages) sent to those addresses, and
4) a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the subscribers.
What you're describing is a particular mailing list configuration (one often seen today); not what mailing lists are.
Traditional mailing lists (such as ones created by a vanilla install of GNU Mailman) do not work they way you describe.
They work like this:
1. You send a message to a mailing list address. This address belongs to a software agent which sends the message to everyone. Your From: header is clearly preserved. The mailing list robot adds itself to the Cc: line to stay in the loop.
2. Someone who wants to continue your discussion publicly hits Reply All. At this point, the mail software composes a a new message which To: you, From: this person, and Cc: to the mailing list.
3. You receive the message directly. The robot also receives it because it is in the Cc: loop, and sends it to the subscribers. (If you're also one of the subscrbers, and the list is configured that way, it will avoid sending you a "list copy").
4. And so it goes.
But what do I know; I have only used mailing lists for 25 years, and run mailing lists of my own on my own server.
What you describe certainly used to be common, but it's not anymore. You didn't say why the old style is better.
I find it frustrating for a mailing list because invariably a long thread is going to have missing messages. In the context of a mailing list the default behavior should be to reply to the list and setting the Reply-To takes care of that nicely.
Btw, the "because I've been doing it for n years" argument gets less effective as n increases. Ok, it's probably a bell curve but it peaks long before 25.
Reply-To does not take care of anything nicely. There is no "default" behavior about how to reply; you have to think about whether to reply privately or publicly based on the topic and your intended content. (If anything, the default should probably be privately, unless the response really is of interest to the whole multitude of subscribers. All too often, mailing list discussions devolve to the point that it's not the case.)
Reply-To: stomps over the option of replying privately. It can still be done, with manual steps. Worse, someone might not be paying attention, and just use Reply out of habit, thinking it's a private reply, when in fact it is being broadcast to the list. It's very sneaky!
The old style is better because it is more convenient and non-broken. It keeps conversations intact by letting people have a debate with the mailing list without subscribing to it, and doesn't rudely re-program your Reply button into doing Reply All.
Yeah, I'm old too. I subscribed to INFO-COBOL@MC (which was not about COBOL, but used that name because joke mailing lists were forbidden on the ARPANET), DB-LOVERS@MC (maintained by the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow, specializing in dead baby jokes, not databases), ITS-LOVERS@MC aka UNIX-HATERS@MC, and I also ran a large international mailing list NeWS-makers@brillig.umd.edu, with lots of redistribution lists as well as usenet subscribers (routed via uunet) for many years during the 80's.
My point is that an email message that has a bunch of people's addressed in it, but no central server or list of email addresses, which you reply to by copying all the addresses in the To: and CC: fields, is not a mailing list, no matter how sophisticated your email reader is. It's just an email message, and you're doing all of the work in your email reader. (Hello, Emacs!) That's not a mailing list. It's just an email message with a list of recipients. There's nothing preventing any recipient from adding or removing any address from the list, and there's no central archive or administration or moderation.
Here's what mailing lists looked like in the 80's:
Who remembers Mark Crispin's oft-repeated catch phrase, "MM is not at fault!"
JWZ's Law of Software Envelopment:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
My point never was that an e-mail message is a mailing list.
What is a mailing list? It is an "emergent phenomenon"(+). It is not just the mailing list manager; it is not just the handling of a single message. It's not the set of subscribers. It's the whole situation.
My favorite instance of emergent mailing list behavior was when a trouble maker named GUMBY created a "PLEASE-REMOVE-ME" mailing list, just for people who sent email to another entire mailing list asking to be removed from it, instead of sending their request to the administrator at mailing-list-name-REQUEST.
Whenever somebody would make that faux-pas, he'd add them to the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, and the emergent behavior was that those people would discuss amongst themselves the fact that they really wanted to be removed from the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, until they eventually learned that the way to get removed from a mailing list was to simply send email to PLEASE-REMOVE-ME-REQUEST, instead of the entire mailing list.
I only described the technical back-drop for mailing lists. The behaviors of setting Reply-To: headers, and of rejecting posts from non-subscribers, are still implemented as hacks against the old mechanism. These configuration features have not changed how mailing lists work.
My original original point is that moderating mailing lists is not possible. I have not seen an effective counterargument. Reply-to munging and subscribe-to-post do not add up to effective moderation, and are easily circumvented.
I have seen it happen: someone banned from posting to a mailing list harassing discussion participants anyway. Perhaps he subscribed with a phony e-mail address to collect the list traffic, and then just composed replies as himself to everyone in the debate, but excluding the list robot (which would reject the copy).
"Modern" mailing lists still pass through the Cc: material which makes this possible, even though they set Reply-To, and disallow posts from non-members.
I don't care how you set up your mailing list; you're not going to easily be able to moderate out persistent trolls. You can't use IP block banning easily, because trolls don't contact your server directly; they can go through any number of e-mail service providers. If a troll keeps coming back over and over again, using different gmail addresses, are you going to ban everything from gmail?
In a 'modern' mailing list a troll will be able to spam people on the list, but they won't really be replied to. They won't be able to participate. The actual conversations will be moderated.
What is true is that the troll's message will not appear in the list's archive. (That's how I became aware that one person was actually a troll; I went to the archive, and, huh? This guy is not there! And neither are my replies to that guy. What the .... Then it immediately dawned on me!)
But, yes, trolls will be replied to. Because, remember, they are not even going through the mailing list robot. They are just sending mail. Of course the troll's mails can be replied to and go back to that person, and to everyone on the CC list that he or she put in.
Not only that, but the troll can include the list address on the CC: line! A reply to the troll will include quoted material from the troll (typically), and since the person responding is a valid subscriber who is allowed to post, that quoted material gets to the list.
So all the list subscribers end up seeing:
On Monday, October 6, 2014 T. Roll wrote:
> Inflammatory crap ...
I disagree with your inflammatory crap!
Nobody on the has the original message with the full inflammatory crap (except those on the CC: list of that troll thread including the person writing the above response). But thanks to this reply and others like it, everyone on the list continues to have glimpses into what T. Roll thinks. (They are is even trimmed nicely to give the list members just the most inflammatory parts!)
But if the list is set up differently you can get it so people don't use reply all by default, and even better they can tell at a glance if a mail came from the list or not.
Does anybody remember the nettime mailing list, and the amazing ascii graphics code-poetry performance art trolling (and excellent personalized customer support) by Netochka Nezvanova aka NN aka antiorp aka integer aka =cw4t7abs aka m2zk!n3nkunzt aka punktprotokol aka 0f0003, the brilliant yet sociopathic developer of nato.0+55+3d for Max? Now THAT was some spectacular trolling (and spectacular software).
http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/
The name Netochka Nezvanova is a pseudonym borrowed from the main character of Fyodor Dostoevski’s first novel; it translates loosely as “nameless nobody.” Her fans, her critics, her customers and her victims alike refer to her as a “being” or an “entity.” The rumors and speculation about her range all over the map. Is she one person with multiple identities? A female New Zealander artist, a male Icelander musician or an Eastern European collective conspiracy? The mystery only propagates her legend.
Cramer, Florian. (2005) "Software dystopia: Netochka Nezvanova - Code as cult" in Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, Chapter 4, Automatisms and Their Constraints. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070215185215/http://pzwart.wdk...
Empire = body.
hensz nn - simply.SUPERIOR
per chansz auss! ‘reazon‘ nn = regardz geert lovink + h!z !lk
az ultra outdatd + p!t!fl pre.90.z ueztern kap!tal!zt buffoonz
ent!tl!ng u korporat fasc!ztz = haz b!n 01 error ov zortz on m! part.
[ma!z ! = z!mpl! ador faz!on]
geert lovink + ekxtra 1 d!menz!onl kr!!!!ketz [e.g. dze ultra unevntfl \
borrrrrrr!ng andreas broeckmann. alex galloway etc]
= do not dze konzt!tuz!on pozez 2 komput dze teor!e much
elsz akt!vat 01 lf+ !nundaz!e.
jetzt ! = return 2 z!p!ng tea + !zolat!ng m! celllz 4rom ur funerl.
vr!!endl!.nn
ventuze.nn
/_/
/
\ \/ i should like to be a human plant
\/ _{
_{/
i will shed leaves in the shade
\_\ because i like stepping on bugs
> Mailing lists don't include the email addresses of all of the recipients in the distributed messages To or CC fields, and the From and Reply-to is the address of the mailing list, never a list of all users on the mailing list.
Counterexample to your claim: browse the linux kernel mailing list archive at https://lkml.org/
On any message you can click [headers] to view the headers. You can see rich Cc: lines full of addresses. Well, you can't see the addresses because they have been scrubbed. But you can count the commas! For instance:
Cc: Rusty Russel <>, , , , John Smith <>,
means that it was CC'd to 6 e-mail addresses, four of which were in the "local@domain" format, with no display name, not wrapped in angle brackets.
Sounds like a terrible idea. Is it a bug or a feature? Why would anyone want to do that? I'd be afraid that some mail readers would choke on the empty addresses, and I can't think of any reason you'd want them, or any purpose they'd serve. It doesn't ever include actual email addresses in the cc does it? Because those poor users would get at least two copies of every reply.
The empty addresses are just in the public mail archive that is exposed through the web. They were scrubbed away by the archiver software. The recipients of the original message got it with all that information intact.
Users do not get two copies because the mailing list software is smart enough to calculate a set difference between the expanded mailing list, and the set of addresses which are already in To: or Cc:
GNU Mailman makes this a configurable preference (per subscriber, I think!) The reason is that some people prefer to get the duplicates. A possible reason is that they want the official list copy, which is subject to some custom mail processing rules based on its list headers, or rewritten subject line.
By the way, some people also prefer to get only mailing list digests. For users who receive only digests, discussion participation is still possible because the discussion is based on the normal To/From/CC mechanism of e-mail.
Sounds too clever by half. How can the mailing list software know that the direct reply actually got through to the people in the To: and CC: list?
Didn't the intended recipients occasionally miss replies to their messages, and wasn't it a bad idea to put the responsibility of re-sending bounced (or un-routable) email to the person you're replying to in the hands of the person writing the reply, not the mailing list itself? I doubt it would have worked very reliably with usenet addresses or the early internet with all those relays.
Remember when all the UK's host names were backwards, and you'd route mail through nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk (or uk.ac.ucl.cs.nss, depending which side of the pond you were on), which would swap the host names around on the way through?
The Brits drive on the wrong side of the road too, so I suppose backward domain names made sense to them.
Mailing lists are centrally managed, and have a "reflector" or central distribution point (what you call a "robot") which maintains the email addresses of all the people on the mailing list. In order to add or remove yourself to the mailing list, you typically have to send a message to name-of-mailing-list-REQUEST, not to the whole mailing list of course. Now days there are usually web pages that people can use to subscribe and unsubscribe and view the archives, and which the administrator can use to moderate messages, but in the old days the moderator was a human and administered the list via email. To save bandwidth (in the days that it mattered, i.e. over the slow ARPANET and over international connections and expensive dial up modems) there would be redistribution lists for regions and organizations, which users or local administrators would have to manage themselves (or the central administrator would have to forward requests to the redistribution list administrator), so only one copy of the message had to be sent to each redistribution list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list
An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or customers, but typically refers to four things:
1) a list of email addresses,
2) the people ("subscribers") receiving mail at those addresses,
3) the publications (email messages) sent to those addresses, and
4) a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the subscribers.