On Tue, 2001-11-13 at 14:29, Steven M. Scotten wrote:
> "reply-all" means reply to everyone. "reply" means reply to the sender.
> On a discussion list, the sender is the list, and that's how it should
> be.
Sender, in SMTP-speak, is the person who initiated the message
-transfer-, not the author. Reply should -never- go to Sender. Reply
should go to Reply-To, or From, in that order.
Reply-To, however, is not made for the end-user's convenience. It's
there to provide mail administrators a way to get mails to return to a
different address than the author's from address, for instance, if my
mail comes from 'mobiletroid.hayseed.net' but I can't receive mail there
because of firewall or routing restrictions, I'd need to add a Reply-To:
in order to get my mail into my mailhost at hayseed.net.
I'm glad I don't have to do that, because if I did, I couldn't get
personal replies from this list, since my Reply-To: header would have
been hacked on by the list. That's a fourth point I didn't bring up at
first, but Reply-To hacking also makes it -impossible- to reply to some
people, since their correct reply address gets destroyed by the list
software. Reply-To should only -ever- be added or modified by the
outgoing SMTP server or the actual sender's mail client.
> R., your mailer is prerelease, and you should probably petition the
> makers of that software to include a feature that most mailers do,
> which is to ask you which address to use when reply-to and from differ
> from one another.
I use many different mailers on multiple machines, and I've never seen
this 'feature.' I quote 'feature' like that because such a feature's
-only- use is to get around reply-to munging. Reply-to should ALWAYS be
honored (per RFC 822), because the idea is that someone put it on there
for a good reason, see above. Making a feature that gets around this is
breaking your mailer's standards compliance to get around someone's
badly-thought-out hacking of headers.
> Eliminating reply-to will mean eliminating the ANSWERS to important
> technical questions by default, which means that we will hear the same
> questions over and over again as the answers remain not public. It will
> make the maintenance of the FAQs much more difficult and discourage
> open discussion. Is that really what we want on this list?
People who are supplying good answers probably are smart enough to reply
to the list if it's information that needs archiving and digesting and
FAQ-i-fying. Nothing's being discouraged; people are being -encouraged-
to be more thoughtful in how they make their replies. Quick'n'dirty
'me, too' replies or personal congratulations or flames or the like
don't end up cluttering up archives and digests and inboxes, and
off-topic conversations are easily taken off-line by -not- hitting
reply-all. (*shrug)
Which I thought was what everyone was complaining about, so I was
offering a solution.
> Ahhh, well, it's a rhetorical question and I don't really want it
> answered. I just wanted to add my voice to the din on the side of
> keeping reply-to set to the list.
(*nod) Fair enough. I'm pretty much done with this, myself. Having
adminned a grillion mailing lists myself over the years, I've formed a
strong opinion (as we can all see), and I flog it about occasionally,
but I've also learned that sometimes people -like- incorrect behaviors
for some reason or another, and although I'll argue the merits of not
dwiddling Reply-To 'till the cows come home, that would get boring, and
nobody really seems interested. So, Kirk out....
-- R Pickett The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, Hayseed Networks legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs emerson_at_hayseed.net eagerly for just two things -- bread and circuses.-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Dec 01 2001 - 20:02:44 EST