Re: Mailing list headers
On Sat, Jan 25, 2003 at 07:12:23PM -0800, Alexander Hvostov wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-01-25 at 12:53, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> > That solution relies upon the person sending the reply being aware of
> > the original poster's preference so that he can select reply to
> > sender, reply to list, or reply to all accordingly. Much better to
> > have a header which indicates the OP's desires in a form which MUAs
> > can understand so that responders don't have to worry about it.
>
> The original poster should not be able to dictate whether or not
> responses will go to the list.
I agree - the OP should not be able to force replies to go to a
specific destination. He should, however, be able to indicate a
preference in a manner which can be recognized by MUAs and easily
overridden by responders. For example, a MUA with a single 'reply to
default address' command which will reply to the reply-to: address if
one is set, then to the MFT: address, and finally to the from:
address if neither is present (or maybe do RT: and MFT: in the other
order); a second 'reply to sender' command which will always go to
the from: address regardless of other headers; and a third 'reply to
all' command which will go to all addresses present in the message's
headers.
My point is that, as the person responding to a message, I want my
MUA to be able to honor the OP's desires without requiring that I be
aware of them, while also being able to ignore them if I believe I
have a good reason to do so.
> In the doco at http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html it says that
> Mail-Followup-To causes _group_replies_ to be sent to the given address.
> In other words, it's identical to Reply-To. That's not quite the same
> thing.
My understanding of reply-to is that it causes _all_ replies to go to
the specified address, while MFT (as you say) should only affect
_group_ replies. How does this make RT and MFT identical? (Or am I
just misunderstanding you?)
--
The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the
White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that
we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened.
- Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)
Reply to: