A listadmin's plea.....

[Michael S. Fischer]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 01:54:34PM -0700, Kysh wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 01:40:58PM -0700, Mike Markley wrote:
> > Bah... a list that doesn't mangle headers in evil ways is misconfigured? :P
> 
> It's not evil! It follows the original intent of the RFCs! Christ almighty, 
> I've never understood you people. The email is sent to an address. That
> address turns around and re-sends it. Why on earth should the from not be
> set to the address that re-sent it? Why should the reply-to field be added?
> It's a complete mangling of protocol, and it's really annoying to boot. 

Read this, and see if it convinces you:

http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

> It makes no sense for 'reply' to go to the individual, unless it's an 
> announcement-based list, instead of a discussion-based list. 

I often see situations in which a response intended to an individual
(often including personal information such as "Call me at XXX-XXXX") is
accidentally delivered to a mailing list because there was no method in
the user agent to reply to the individual ("Reply" and "Reply All" have
the same effect) due to such header munging by the list processor.

When I manage mailing lists, I prefer to reduce the potential of such
embarrassments by configuring the list as BAD is set, so that "Reply"
means reply to sender, and "Reply All" means reply to everyone.  The
meanings of the actions to take are then unambiguous, as I believe they
should be.

-- 
Michael S. Fischer / michael at dynamine.net / +1 650-533-4684
Lead Hacketeer, Dynamine Consulting, Silicon Valley, CA