Re: Bogus reply-to
"Monique Y. Mudama" <spam@bounceswoosh.org> said on Sun, 8 Aug 2004 10:05:12 -0600:
> On 2004-08-08, Tim Connors penned:
> >:0 a:
> > .duplicates
> >
>
> Do I really need to repeat for the hundredth time that I read
> debian-user through gmane, ie, as a newsgroup, so that your procmail
> recipe does precisely diddly for me??
I read that after posting.
I suggest that gmane is the wrong tool for the job - I;ve heard plenty
of people say it sucks for mailing lists, and this appears to be
another case (actually, google seem to be really doing a good job at
making sucky UIs and not implementing proper protocols - witness
google groups 2 and how it doesn't set and preserve "References:"; but
I digress). But anyway...
> Sorry. I've just gotten that response a ton of times, and 1) it doesn't
> help me, and 2) it's beside the point. I shouldn't *have* to do any of
> this -- d-u has a policy against cc'ing unless requested, and I set my
> mail headers appropriately.
I too use the wrong tool for the job; I am reading this through
news://linux.debian.user (newsgroups are so much more convenient that
mailing lists, particularly since I already read a dozen newsfroups),
which preserves every header, so I can munge them back into something
sensible, *except* it doesn't preserve Reply-To (for your posts, it
sets "Mail-Copies-To: never", which I use in my script to detect
people not wanting reply-tos).
Possibly this is why people reply-to you directly.
I personally think that policies on mailing lists shouldn't dictate
things like reply-to (not that this one has been made publicly known
other than through your rants), because some people prefer to get a
reply-to (me, for example - reply-to means I can see any responses to
me straight away without having to wait for the mailing list to do its
thing), and I think it clutters the list to say "please reply to
me". Let your mailer do its thing (set your own reply-to[1] as
necessary, as you do), and hope that everyone respects it.
There's also the issue that differnt mailing lists adopting different
practices means that no-one can actually keep track of which practice
is used where, so they just use the one that is most convenient for
them.
[1] Even if Reply-To is considered harmful
(http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html), and causes some
mailers to drop the mailing list off the list of CCs, and will end up
replying only to your single bogus address.
--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
But if I ever have a child, I will certainly be naming it "Sun
Microsystems". -- Hipatia
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