Neil Schneider wrote: > David Brown wrote: > >> 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. > > Specious argument that's been beat to death on nearly every technical list on > the internet. If you check the headers I sent this message to the list and to > you privately. The mailing list didn't take any choice away, I simply had to > be smarter than the email. Funny this discussion never comes up on my bicycle > list, or my family list, or any number of other lists I subscribe to that are > not computer technology related. >
Well now, I can argue two sides as well as some, ;-) so I have to say I _can_ actually appreciate the gripe about reply-to (at least the way it affects my thunderbird client). tbird provides a "Reply" icon (with tooltip "reply to the message"), and a "Reply All" icon (tooltip "reply to sender and all recipients") along with corresponding Message menu entries (with hotkeys shown ^R, SHIFT+^R) and the, also on the rightclick context menu slightly different wording "reply to sender only" and "reply to all", which I believe are still the same 2 operations. When there is no reply-to, reply/reply-to-sender uses the "From:" header (I think), but when there is a Reply-to, it uses the Reply-to. If there is no reply-to reply all includes the sender, if there is it includes the list instead of the sender (which it _could_ get from the "From:" header, right?) OK, so the intended meaning of rfc2822 seems like it may be: instructions for the client to always use reply-to in place of from-address. ==> Thus the gripe that I can't (as easily) reply to the From-address when a reply-to has taken over.Furthermore it is not the original sender's intent to make himself harder to (er) reply to. ==> This may be considerably *more important on lists that allow posts from non-subscribers*. ==> I can easily agree that the mail client (or it's user) is the part of the system that is broken. * * * * * Now I thought I remembered seeing something like "reply to list" mentioned somewhere, so I go looking and find a tbird extension http://alumnit.ca/wiki/index.php?page=ReplyToListThunderbirdExtension but, it doesn't seem to work with 2.0.0.9. The webpage says something about List-Post header, but it's not clear whether the extension requires one of those to work. There are even words like wait 'till tbird 3.0. The addition on another user option "Reply-to-List" does seem like it would be what I'm looking for. In fact I'd like to see Reply-to-all Reply-to-list Reply-to-sender (using From: even if there's a reply-to) Reply (to my configured choice) I do kinda think maybe lists should use something like a List-Post header, and then the Reply can go back to meaning a substitute for the From-address. Ahh, I see now that the link Dave gave is where I saw List-Post mentioned. It even has an rfc: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt oh gee, life is soooo complicated! Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
