On 2025-11-20 11:12, Brendan Tildesley wrote:
On the mailing list web interface, when I want to reply to an email, I
click Reply To ..., but it opens up a new email in my mail client with
To: set to directly email that person rather than the list, does not
include the subject, or body to reply to.
I have been perpetually bewildered by the email process ever since I
first started contributing. I feel like there is nothing wrong with
email per-se, but the clients and interfaces we use often seem allergic
to convenience.
It seems that to reply to an an email on, say, guix-devel, one can:
A) Have already previously subscribed to the list so that the email can
be correctly replied to -- This is a bit unrealistic. If you're not
already subscribed how do you respond to previous emails?
B) Manually copy paste information from the html source code, or mbox
archive to set To:, CC: etc. -- I've done this many times but it feels
a bit ridiculous.
C) Download the mbox archives and import into email client -- Seems to
work, but the archives may not be refreshed for emails from 5 minutes ago.
Is there some reason why a simple "reply via email" button can't Just
Work(tm)? Especially if I'm on mobile and want to quickly reply to
something. Or am i missing something obvious?
Hi,
I suppose you talk about this one:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2025-11/msg00081.html
Clicking reply redirects you to:
mailto:[email protected]?In-Reply-To=afca466b-6b0e-4f7a-ac17-12dc91a4fecf%40brendan.scot&Subject=Mailing%20list%20%22reply%20via%20email%22%20inconvenience.
Which in my case sets the Subject properly. Maybe it's your email client
that doesn't know how to deal with the link.
I don't know if we have access to this mailing list software to change
that to include a button for "reply-to-list". Do we? or is it just
managed by GNU?
I think we can even add the body:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6068
But email clients have to support that, of course, and we need to have
access to the mailing list software, which is an infrastructure that I
don't know if we manage.
Best,
Ekaitz
