Re: Policy on cross-posting to multiple lists

On Thu, 10 Jan 2019 at 17:18, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> * Dean Rasheed (dean(dot)a(dot)rasheed(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> > Has the policy on cross-posting to multiple lists been hardened recently?
>
> This most recent change was to implement a policy where we don't allow
> public lists to be CC'd with other public lists; when that happens we
> instead reply with an email basically saying "please pick the right list
> to send your email to."

The problem with that as a mechanism for stopping people from cross
posting is that it doesn't (and can't) actually stop the message from
being delivered to people already on the CC list for that thread.

So in this case, Andrew first cross posted it, but I was already on
the CC list, so I got the message as normal, not realising that it
hadn't come via the lists. I then hit "Reply all" ... (rinse and
repeat). I didn't even immediately notice the failure to send the
message because my own reply just got added to end of the conversation
in my mail client, but presumably the intention was that both Andrew
and I should have noticed and re-posted to a single list. But of
course that would then have annoyed all the people already on the
thread who would have got duplicates of mails they had already
received.

Personally, I don't have a problem with people cross posting. I think
there are real cases where it's the right thing to do -- it's common
practice for legitimate reasons. Yes, it can be abused, but there are
worse abuses of email all the time.

Regards,
Dean