[ Craig Sanders writes ] > On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 11:26:25AM -0800, Philip Brown wrote: > > And in the case of the debian mailing lists, you should "reply to" the > > list. > > bullshit. > > some replies should go to the list, and some replies should be private. > it's up to the person writing the reply to make that decision, not the > list software.
But the primary point of a mailing list is for discussion ON THE LIST. Do you want to disagree with that? So headers should be optimized for group discussion. Replying to individuals is a secondary function. > setting reply-to back to the list just makes it difficult (or in > some cases impossible) to reply privately. ... >.... however reply-to munging by list software does have the > serious disadvantage of replacing any Reply-To header created by the > original author of a message. So what, if the mailing software rewrites From: to have any reply-to information from the original sender? Then the information is still available. > the Reply-To header exists for the *person* who originally sent the > message to be able to direct replies to their preferred destination. it > is not there so that mailing lists can screw with it. So your argument is "A mailing list is not a person, so it can't use reply-to:". Bad argument. [http://faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html] rfc822, section 4.4.3, EXPLICITLY MENTIONS "text message teleconferencing" groups (eg mailing lists) as potential users of the reply-to header, expressly for the purpose of having "reply" direct email to the list!!!! And finally, example A.3.3 EXPLICITLY shows that "reply-to" is NOT exclusively for "who wrote the message". It is for "Where do you want replies to normally go to"
