Ben Finney <ben+deb...@benfinney.id.au> writes: >> You're arguing that a Reply-To header is "harmful" (not that I am >> convinced) > > That field is very useful. What's harmful is mailing-list software > munging that field, which is for the author to set and for nothing else > to fiddle with.
Yup. Reply-To is for the _original sender's_ use! If mailing list software were to start setting Reply-To, what is it supposed to do if it gets a message with Reply-To already set (by the original sender)? It could (1) overwrite the original Reply-To header, breaking personal replies to the sender, or it could (2) refrain from setting Reply-To for such messages, completely confusing the readers who have become accustomed to depending on the mailing-list's setting. I think there's no perfect solution to the general problem, because there's too wide a variety of MUAs in use, which support different feature sets. But it's much better to get "duplicate" messages in some cases than to break things in a way that leads to _lost_ messages. My experience is that in practice, it's not such a huge problem anyway; a combination of MUA list-followup commands + Mail-Followup-To: headers + MUA duplicate suppression seems to keep duplicates in check reasonably well... -Miles -- If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. [George Carlin] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org