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Re: more developer identity stuff



[ Please don't Cc: public replies to me. ]

Nathan E Norman:
> If this is the case, then reading the lists with Pine is indeed a PITA!
> (I know there are other alternatives to Pine, but I'm used to it and so
> far too lazy to change ...)

I assume you mean that it is painful to reply to list messages with Pine.
I think Pine makes it fairly easy to remove and move addresses (ctrl-k
removes an address, ctrl-u inserts it again).

For what it's worth, I don't think Reply-to should be set by the
mailing list, because its definition was botched by RFC822 (it has too
many meanings). Thus, too many mail user agents (or their authors) get
confused, and operate in surprising ways when Reply-to is forced by the
list. For example, every self-respecting mail user agent has separate
"reply to author of message" and "reply to everyone" commands. If
the mail has a Reply-to header, most mail user agents will obey that
automatically. Thus, it is easy to send comments meant to be private to
the list. One wishes that everyone would check their To and Cc headers
before sending private comments, but that's not how people work,
especially since it's necessary only on a few mailing lists.

Without the Reply-to, most users need to edit the To/Cc headers manually
to remove non-list respondents. I consider this to be a smaller evil than
sending private message to lists by mistake.

The new headers will solve these problems, of course, but it will take
time until they're in wide-enough use. (I don't use them myself, because
my MH/exmh/procmail/other mail configuration has become complicated and
fragile enough that I'm considering writing a new mailer from scratch
rather than touch the config. This is not a joke.)

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