begin quoting David Brown as of Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 08:49:56PM -0800:
> On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 07:23:43PM -0800, James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
[snip]
> >I thought the "this list" option made eminent sense, so why would they
> >use the _strongly recommended_ language?
> >
> >Are there any downsides to this header setting?
>
> Some have mentioned that it violates RFC-822, which is not quite true. It
> voilates RFC-2822, the new document describing mail messages.
>
> <http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful>
>
> is a good summary.
To a point. The article says:
People still using these two documents to debate the issue are wasting
everybody's time. The issue was definitively settled in 2001, and Chip
won.
...except he didn't. Most mailing lists that I've seen munge the Reply-To.
I suspect this is because mailing lists that _don't_ have a hard time
keeping traffic up enough for the list to be useful, and thus they die.
However, this is personal experience, and I self-select for a certain
sort of list anyway. I have not taken a survey of all mailing lists,
and categoriezed them. It's also exactly contrary to the author of
the above article's personal experience.
Maybe you folks whom google likes will have better luck.
> The main disadvantage to setting Reply-To is that it
> overwrites whatever the original poster might have used this field for. If
> they don't use it, a modern client, such as mutt, will still allow a reply
> to go to either. Many clients don't give a choice, and the only way to
> reply to the possible sender is to cut and paste the address.
...which is not difficult, mind you..
> You'll usually find a lot of strong opinions about it, usually boiling down
> to people either wanting to make the choice themselves, or not having to
> think about it.
The problem is that mailing lists approximate a newsgroup or a fidonet
topic [yikes! it's been to long! Did I remember that correctly?] -- for
some folks. Otherfolks don't see a mailing list the same way.
So it's a culture clash. Some people view a mailing list one way, and
they're Right By God And Death To The Infidels, and others view a mailing
list another way, and they, too, are Right By God And Burn The Heretics.
Personally, I don't _want_ the default to be reply-to-sender. Force
that on me, and my Reply-To will be set to /dev/null. It's not like
my email address is being munged in the header as well (although that's
an interesting idea: what if the From: was replaced with a user-specific
string?).
> If you set a mailing list to munge Reply-To, you pretty much give up any
> complaint you might have about people posting to the list. A reply may be
> off topic, and really should have just been sent to the original poster,
> but the list didn't give them that choice.
Yup.
Munging the reply-to says "we're a community here, deal".
Not munging the reply-to says "we've got serious business here, deal".
--
RFC does not automatically mean "good idea". All stupid together is still dumb.
Stewart Stremler
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
