At 11:39 5/1/95, Dave Barr wrote:
>In message <m0s5UTU-0009pgC@wice.xs4all.nl>, Paul J. Stevens writes:
>>Why is the Reply-To header not added as a default, making
>>standard list-replies go to the original author, in stead of the
>>list ? Is there a solid reason for doing this,
>
>Yes, there are several.
>
>1. If you add a reply-to pointing back to the list, with many mail
>user agents it becomes very hard to overrride this and send mail
>to the original person _only_ instead of to the list. This is
>my greatest complaint with LISTSERV. When I was on more LISTSERV
>lists, hardly a week went by when someone didn't send mail to the
>list saying "hi Joe I got your mail, thanks for the response. how
>about lunch on friday?". A few of those weren't so congenial.
>
>2. There are broken mailers out there which refuse to behave according
>to the standards. They send bounce messages to the "From:" or "Reply-To:"
>address. If you have a Reply-To: back to the list, you just opened
>the door wide open to a mail loop.
>
>Virtually every mail reader I've used comes with two 'reply' buttons/keys.
>One to reply to just the sender, and one to reply to all recipients.
>(the latter is the one I used to generate this reply)
>
You're losing me with your logic in 1 (and 2) above. There are two types of
replies in the MUA - Reply-to-Sender (RtS) and Reply-to-All (RtA). The
composition of the addresses used for RtA is all addresses listed in the
original message's To and Cc headers plus the RtS address. The RtS address
is from one of the following Headers (the Headers are totally scanned once
for each of these Header Types until one is found and the addresses on it
become the RtS address):
Reply-to:
From:
Sender:
Thus if you put the sender onto a Reply-to (and the ML address on a Cc),
then RtS will go to the Poster and RtA will go to the Poster and the List.
The question of the situation in #2 would still go to the Poster.
>Simply educate your users as to the meaning of both buttons, and
>have them use the right one depending on what they want, rather than
>forcing them to do something potentially wrong.
>
There are also those users whose default in the MUA is set to RtA and who
have to override to get only RtS.
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