Hi, folks.
First of all, I *have* read the FAQ, and I do understand the issues
surrounding the use and misuse of the Reply-To header, so I trust we
can avoid rekindling the religious war. :-)
Now, I run majordomo at a site with lots of lists, some of which use the
reply_to option and some of which don't. On the lists which *do* use
reply_to, it would be nice if a poster could override Domo's Reply-To
on a case-by-case basis. For example, if an announcement is posted to
a discussion list with "contact me to buy tickets to this event", we
want the responses to go to the poster (or perhaps even to the poster's
secretary), *not* the to list, even though usually responses to list
posts should go to the list.
The way Majordomo is written, if "reply_to" is set in the config file,
then any Reply-To which was supplied by the user (if any) is overridden
by Majordomo's generated Reply-To header. I am considering patching
this so that Majordomo supplies the Reply-To (if configured to do so, of
course) *only* if the message does not already have a Reply-To header.
I am using version 1.94.3, and I've pretty much figured out exactly what
I need to do to change this behaviour: it's a simple two-line change to
"resend". Before I do this, though, I'm trying to determine what, if
anything, this will break.
Actually, for now, I'm running "resend" in debugging mode, and I've
written a little Perl script to analyze the resulting resend.debug
file, so I can find out how many Reply-To headers are "replaced"
currently, which will give me a handle on the extent of the effect my
change might have on the lists which run at my site.
However, I'd also be curious to know if anyone can think of any
theoretical reasons why I should not make this change. The only one I
can think of right now is that a few list users may have "Reply-To"
set to their own "main" e-mail address for all of their outgoing mail,
so replies to those people's routine posts would not go to the whole
list even though the list config says they should. That is probably a
small price to pay, though my stats should enlighten me on how common
that is. Any other issues I should consider?
Anne.
--
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Analyst, IITS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne@alcor.concordia.ca +1 514 848-7606
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