Shawn Lin wrote,
| I was on a list like that once too, where Reply-to was to the sender.
| VERY little traffic on that list, LOTS of questions, never an answer!
| Even when I'd search through their archives... all questions and no
| answers.
| I think all answers were sent via private email, because even I asked a
| lot of questions and received privately emailed answers.
That certainly is not my experience with reply-to-sender lists. Generally
people have known how to use their reply-to-all commands to respond publicly
when they wished to, and RTS lists are as busy as RTL lists, except that they
don't carry items that were intended privately but accidentally sent to the
whole list. A poster who specifically wants public replies can always point
Reply-To: to the list on his or her post, and an RTS list leaves it unmo-
lested. If people did not do that on the list Shawn remembers, then they may
well have preferred private replies.
I've never seen an RTS list wither because all replies were sent privately.
Most RTL proponents say it happens all the time, but in truth, it doesn't.
Now, Nick has made his decision, and from what I've seen the majority here
like reply-to-list, so RTL it will stay. If a member has decent filtering
software, (s)he can always convert an RTS list to RTL format; but a member of
an RTL list who wants it in RTS format is limited, though, because there is
no way to tell whether the poster's original submission had its own Reply-To:
line, let alone what it read. The RTL option on the list that I run saves
the original reply address (from From: if there was no Reply-To:) in
X-Author-Reply-To: so that the information is available. If other RTL lists
did something like that, so that we'd know where to send private replies when
we want to (or that the poster specifically wants only public replies and had
pegged Reply-To: to the list), then they'd be just as flexible as RTS lists.
If incoming Reply-To: addresses were preserved somewhere, I could rename that
to Reply-To: and have the full RTS format I like while the RTL crowd could
get it the way they please. Either that, or the list could offer both modes,
as my list does.
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