Header fields and followup address (was: Public Domain for Germans)

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:

> PS: What's wrong with using a Mail-Followup-To: header?

(That's “header field”. Remember, folks: an email message has, as
specified in RFC 2822, exactly *one* header, consisting of multiple
fields.)

I can see two reasons:

It's non-standard. It is not one of the standard header fields, so its
name should start with ‘X-’, and its implementation is user-defined in
the absense of a standard. The poorly-written document proposing it
<URL:http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/98dec/I-D/draft-ietf-drums-mail-followup-to-00.txt>
failed to pass, and expired in 1998, so it's unlikely it will ever
*be* standard.

It's essentially obsolete, at least for the purpose of mailing lists,
since RFC 2369 fields that allow the “reply to list” function are
deployed in essentially every mailing list manager. Let's agitate to
fix the “reply to list” functionality where we find it lacking (I'm
looking at you, Thunderbird) before we agitate for non-standard field
implementations.

-- 
 \         “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the |
  `\                                   value of nothing.” —Oscar Wilde |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney