Re: [OT] Re: GRUB, BIOS e HD 40GB and Reply-To:
On 25 Jun 2004, Riccardo Vestrini wrote:
> sorry for the previous message, I mistyped -laptop for -italian
>
> why debian mailing lists do not send messages with a
> Reply-To: header which instructs mail client to reply a message to list
> instead of sender?
Because many people, including the list maintainers, consider forcing
the 'Reply-To' header back to the list to be the worse of two evils.
Basically, in the simple case setting 'Reply-To' to the list works fine.
That is, when the correspondents only wish to have a conversation on the
list.
The failure case is *far* worse for setting the 'Reply-To', though.
If you mean to make a comment private, and 'Reply-To' is set, your
comment is broadcast to the world.
I have seen dozens of incidents where this has caused real embarrassment,
or worse, to people. There have been countless[1] other cases where no
harm has resulted.
Also, setting the 'Reply-To' header to the list gives a choice of
excluding some participants[2] who need 'Reply-To' to get email, or
having some but not all mail behave in a different and unexpected way.
Finally, it makes it very much harder to remove a discussion from the
list, so encourages the list to drift - and stay - off topic more often.
Personally, I use 'gnus' under xemacs to read my email. One of the
features is that I can set it to fill in the mailing list address
automatically. Perhaps your mail client can do the same, or you can
change mail clients?
Finally, you can always use a mail mangling script locally to add the
'Reply-To' header based on the list information at the time of delivery,
rather than relying on the server to do it for you.
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Well, I didn't enumerate them. ;)
[2] Including, for a while, me -- I had to use reply-to or I couldn't
get any mail back in, due to the ... situation at my place of work.
--
"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral,
if only you can find it."
-- Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_
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