Is this an issue of posting etiquette?

[John Kaufmann]

At 030202 13:50 -0500, Shing-Fat Fred Ma wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I'm finding that I sometimes receive
>email on a thread that is also posted
>to a mailing list or newsgroup.  It could
>be a thread I started, or joined afterward.
>
>The problem is that there is no information
>on the headers that the email is also posted
>to the forum.  So my reply is not copied to
>the forum.  The thread is broken, and that
>defeats the purpose of the forum.
>
>Because this is happening alot lately I
>think it might be the default behaviour of
>certain mailing programs (maybe the only
>behaviour?).  I don't have any suspect
>programs in mind, but I know that netscape
>doesn't do this by default.  Anyone else
>finding this?  Would it be OK to clarify
>whether this is proper etiquette in the mailing
>list welcome, and maybe the way to avoid
>this behaviour with some of the more common
>programs?
>...

Fred, it has nothing to do with posting etiquette, and really not 
much to do with which mail clients people are using.

The reason you are seeing that a lot lately is because of the change 
in this list, made a couple months ago, to drop the "Reply-To: list" 
header.   One consequence is that the appropriate reply is now 
"Reply-to-all" in order to get the reply to the list - which also has 
the unfortunate side effect of posting privately as well, an effect 
which may vary a bit depending on which headers are set in the post 
to which you reply. [If you notice the headers now, some posts have 
vnc-list in the "From:" header, some have it in "To:", and some in 
"Cc:".  But never, sadly, in "Reply-To:".]

The loss of proper threading, and increased confusion, to which you 
refer was predicted by many posters, and I believe understood, before 
the change was made.  IMHO the list has become a bit poorer - 
marginally less useful - for the change.  But it has nothing to do 
with list etiquette.
--
John