On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Jeanne Ward wrote:

>Having publicly humiliated myself once today (and yes, I thought I was
>responding to a private post), may I ask?
>
>Why is it so hard to respond to the individual rather than the list on
>HistArch?
>
>Jeanne Ward

Because most mailers assume that when you reply to a message that came to
you from a mailing list you want your reply to go to the mailing list as
well.  Some mailing lists resend e-mail that comes to them, so all of your
list traffic comes from one address, ie [log in to unmask]  This
means that when you reply to it, it'll go right back where it came from,
where (hopefully) a helpful little daemon takes the message and sends it
to everyone under the list.

Other lists (like this one) just redirect the mail, but attach a
"Reply-to:" address to it. Some mailers will use this reply-to address
automagicaly, and with no choice; mine (I'm using PINE in Unix) asks me if
I really want to.

--Dan