Great Circle Associates List-Managers
(December 2000)
 

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Subject: How to get reply-all to work
From: Ellen Spertus <spertus @ mills . edu>
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 20:16:09 -0800
To: list-managers @ GreatCircle . COM
Cc: spertus @ mills . edu

I am writing a mailing-list manager and am trying to figure out how to set 
the headers so that:

- the client's reply command causes mail to go to the original sender
- the client's reply-all command causes mail to go to the original sender 
and the list

I like Dan Bernstein's suggestions re Mail-Follow-Up and Mail-Reply-To 
(http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html) but don't know if they're actually 
supported by MUAs.

What I'm currently doing is using the original sender as reply-to, the list 
name as cc, and the recipients as bcc.  To prevent infinite regress, the 
list manager ignores messages sent by itself.  This worked fine when I sent 
the same message to all subscribers.  For n subscribers, I would send 1 
message with n+1 recipients.

The problem is I'm switching to using VERPs 
(http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt), which require a distinct message for each 
subscriber.  This would require me to send n messages, each with 2 
recipients (the real recipient and the list (so reply-all works)).  This 
would cause me to send n wasteful list->list messages, which I would rather 
avoid.

How do other people handle this?

Ellen

P.S. FYI, the mailing list manager I'm writing (javamlm) is based on ezmlm 
but provides greater per-user customization and easier programmer 
extensibility.  With its greater power but lesser scalability, it's aimed 
at communities of thousands (not millions) of users.  




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