Jim Bell sentenced to 10 years in prison

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2001 at 12:56:23PM -0700, John Young wrote:
> Eugene,
> 
> I'd appreciate your not addressing mail to me concerning
> Jim Bell, though that may be due to the way your mailer
> is set up to respond to cpunk mail.
> 
> I got subpoenaed to the grand jury and trial because
> Jim Bell's responses to my messages to cpunks were
> addressed to me and cc'ed to cpunks, just as yours
> was in this case. Robb London claimed that meant
> Jim and I were in direct communication when I was
> doing all I could to avoid private contact with Jim, then 
> as now.

Too bad no technical people were called upon to explain
how "group reply" works and why many people send copies
to both the original poster and to the list without intending
any direct communication with the poster that they're replying
to.  Of course that would not have served Robb's purposes...


That said, I have set up lne's CDR to not include a Reply-to
field.  I beleive that setting Reply-to[1] on a mailing list is
a Bad Thing since it means that mail that was intended to
be private often accidentally is posted to the list.
Besides the added junk that goes to the list as a result, I
have seen people seriously damage their lives by accidentally
posting very private email to a list when they intended to
mail it to an individual.

OTOH, the cpunks list has, one hopes, more technically
sophisticated readers who would be less likely to make
such a mistake.  And this is one list where there is
an advantage to routing posts through the list.

So, lne CDR subscribers, should I set the Reply-to: in
mail that originates at the lne CDR?  Or should I
set the Reply-to: in mail that goes to lne CDR subscribers?
Or leave it out as I do now?


Eric


[1]: Reply-to: is a header field that most mail readers
use to fill in the default address when generating a reply.
So a Reply-to: cypherpunks at lne.com would mean that by default, someone
replying to list mail would send their reply to cypherpunks at lne.com.
If Reply-to: is not set, then the default is what's in the From: line
which in the case of CDR mail is the original poster.  To reply
to the poster and to the list, one then needs to do a "group reply"
which sends the reply to all the addresses in the header, which
usually means the list and the original poster.