Crap

Rule #1: don't do "svn commit" in a working directory of my blog when there are some unfinished and ill-worded blog posts still in that directory.

Or, in other words, my previous post shouldn't have gone out yet, it wasn't ready; it was way too convoluted and thus failed to bring across the intended message. Revisiting this post before posting it, is something that's been on my list of things to do for a fair while, but it just never happened. I guess the cat's out of the bag now, so I might as well clarify it here and now.

Let me make clear that I did not mean to say that people should just be Cc'ing everyone, whether or not they're on the list, in violation of the stated list policy. Instead, what I meant to say is that I do not believe that a policy on whether or not you should send Cc's to people is the right solution to this kind of thing.

Instead, I think we should have our mail clients support this kind of thing by themselves. There are really two types of "reply" in a mail client: one is a "public" reply, where everyone who read the original mail can also read any follow-ups, and the other is a "private" reply, where you only send your reply to the person who sent the mail you're replying to in the first place. There should not be a difference on the UI level between "reply to the list" or "reply to each and every email address that's in the 'To', 'Cc' and 'From' headers"; MUA software should be smart enough to notice when you're mailing to a mailinglist, and pick the right option out of the latter two all by itself. And if someone really wants a private copy of the mail, adding a header to do that is already possible today.

With that in place, there shouldn't be a need for a code of conduct to state that you should not randomly Cc people. QED.

Then again, obviously mailinglists suck and usenet is much better. But that's another discussion for another time.