On 1/11/13 9:51 AM, Wietse Venema wrote: > Robert Moskowitz: >> On 01/11/2013 09:07 AM, Wietse Venema wrote: >>> Robert, please configure your mail reader to respect the REPLY-TO >>> header. I have asked you this before, and I think I will ignore >>> your email until you play by the same rules as everyone else. >> Sorry about that last transmission. >> >> Your request would be reasonable if every list I am on worked the same way. > If your mail program requires human effort to respect the Reply-To: > header, then you are using the wrong mail program to participate > on a mailing list. I will ignore your posts until that is fixed. > > Wietse > Wietse, I believe that the poster was trying to explain a human engineering problem. Too many email lists have their settings set so that to proper reply to a message from them, you need to use "reply all", which will unfortunately bypass your explicit setting of Reply-To:. If all mailing lists were set up so that one could use "Reply to List" to send back to the list, and all MUA's honored that, things would be great.
Unfortunately, since many MUAs don't provide for the "Reply to List" option, list administrators need to figure out how to set up the list to work acceptably with these MUA (note that the "Reply to List" functionality is not a MUST rule, but I believe even added by a supplemental RFC). To allow for the possibility of using a private reply to the senders prefered address via Reply-To, often it is set up so that without "Reply to List", the options of Reply goes just to the sender, and you need to use Reply-All to get it to the list. Others set Reply-To to go to the list, so to do a private reply, you need to Reply-All and edit out the list address (and the sender has lost the ability to specify their own Reply-To header). This unfortunately teaches people to just use "Reply All" to get the message back to the list, and this has the unfortunate side affect of ignoring Reply-To. A bit like earlier you were explaining how email addresses like "@"@example.com aren't a good idea because it isn't well supported, Reply-To's on mailing list are often enough broken that counting on them to work can be somewhat futile. -- Richard Damon
