At 08:32 AM 2/17/99 -0500, Peter Green wrote:
>Check out http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html for a great
>reason *not* to set the Reply-To: header. Any reasonable mailer should
>have some sort of "reply to (l)ist, (s)ender, (b)oth" option.
And also see the discussion forum that's linked to at the bottom of that
essay for some differing opinions. One of the more common responses is that
without munging, people who hit "Reply to All" in their MUA then need to
trim or cull the To: and Cc: fields to remove all other email addresses;
otherwise, people will get multiple copies of replies to their own posts.
Oddly enough, I have seen quite a few messages on this list start off with
things like "Please don't cc: me, I'm on the list." I strongly suspect that
these illustrate instances of people forgetting to trim their headers while
replying.
And, as many people point out in the forum, Mr. Rosenthal's essay doesn't
handle the simple reality that most list participants prefer to have
Reply-To: set to point back to the list. Before I started running a few
mailing lists, I had already seen the "Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful"
essay, and referred a few of my list members to it. They didn't care. They
said "we want replies to go back to the list!" After a week or two of
participating in those lists and having to rewrite the headers every damn
time I wanted to reply, I agreed with them.
I now munge quite happily, and have had no complaints.
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Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
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>From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
cough and die /v./
Syn. barf. Connotes that the program is throwing its hands up by
design rather than because of a bug or oversight. "The parser saw a
control-A in its input where it was looking for a printable, so it
coughed and died." Compare die, die horribly, scream and die.
