The point is not to minimize traffic but to minimize mistakes.  Some
personal email not meant for the list can be embarrassing, both to
the sender and to the whole list of recipients.  Anything that prods
people to think an extra second about where they are sending their
email is a good thing.

At 12:38 PM -0300 8/21/02, Russ Hunt wrote:
>On the whole, this seems to me to depend on whether you want to
>foment discussion and put up with the extra traffic, or shut
>down discussion to avoid it.  I'd never thought about Reply-
>to=List as _minimizing_ traffic . . .
>
>>  One downside of "Reply-to= List" is that if someone blithely hits
>>  the reply buttons to send a personal reply to the sender, it will
>>  go to the whole list.  "Reply-to= Sender" avoids this problem.
>>  But folks then have to "reply all" (and delete the sender's
>>  address from the To: or Cc: field) to reply just to the whole
>>  list.  It may be worth it if you manage to avoid a bunch of
>>  personal email traffic.
>
>In any case, it seems to me this is less consistent than it was:
>there's more variation in the way people's individual mail
>programs handle this than there was a few years ago (and people
>have, or take, less control over it).
>
>-- Russ
>St. Thomas University
>http://www.StThomasU.ca/~hunt/

--
  Tom Burke, Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina,
  Columbia SC, USA 29208 / Phone: 803-777-3733 / Email: [log in to unmask]