Mail-Followup-To (was: Re: "Do not CC me")
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> Mail-Followup-To is not a standard of any kind.
Just like most mail header fields. RFC 5322 explicitly allow such
optional, unspecified fields.
> It is not implemented in many email clients,
It is also implemented in many email clients. There's an incomplete
list here: http://www.leptonite.org/mft/software.html
> which makes it de facto useless.
well, it does make life easier for those using it, so it cannot be
completely useless. It would of course have been even more useful if it
had been mandatory and MUA developers actually cared, but that is of
course never going to happen.
> Calling MUAs “broken” because they don’t implement something that
> doesn’t even have clear semantics is a quite a stretch.
I agree that missing support for MFT doesn't qualify as "broken", only
"less useful". But I do respect the fact that many people see "less
useful" as a feature because it implies less choices. That's OK.
However, I don't understand how you can call the Mail-Followup-To
semantics unclear. The existing implementations are consistent, and
there are several (informational only, of course) documents describing
it. See e.g
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-drums-mail-followup-to-00.txt and
http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html
Exactly what part of this is unclear to you?
Yes, you may claim that there are no mandatory standards we can attach
to a cluebat if someone were to redefine the field. But is that a real
problem or just an excuse for ignoring any feature request regarding
MFT? It does not seem to be a big problem for those who have
implemented the field.
Bjørn
Reply to: