Jim Bell sentenced to 10 years in prison

[Declan McCullagh]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2001 at 10:51:28AM -0700, Eric Murray wrote:
> 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...

Right. Jim's only witness called in his defense was, well, Jim.

Let me speak up in defense of replying to the poster and the list in
at least some cases. Obviously replying to a long To: line of a dozen
people is just poor manners. But there are at least three advantages
that come to mind when copying the original poster:

1. Email sent individually to someone reaches them faster than
when replying to the list. I've often had half-day lag times in
the past with cypherpunks.

2. Email sent individually to someone will reach them when the 
list is offline. This happened to me earlier this month when 
my cpunx node was offline for three or so days.

3. In my case, I subscribe under a different (but obvious) address
than my well.com one. If copied on a reply, I'll see it sooner than
than if I open the cypherpunks folder on my *nix machine.

Naturally some folks (John, Tim) have expressed a preference not
to be copied on messages.

-Declan