Duncan Findlay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-12-12 23:57:48 -0500]: > On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 09:56:23PM -0500, Matt Kettler wrote: > > If you really want people to reply on-list your should add a Reply-To > > header that contains [EMAIL PROTECTED] to your > > outbound messages. Note this is not "Reply-To munging" since it is done at > > the mail *client* side (ie by the author) not by the list.
I disagree in principle. But by the technicality that you say that it is added by the original author it might just barely scrape by. At least the author is "asking for it" when bad things happen. But it still has the same problem as the list software setting it. A problem is a problem no matter how you sugar coat it. (The problem being that someone tries to send a private reply and instead mistakenly sends to the entire list. I have seen that repeatedly and it is a real problem.) Feel free to try it with this message. Start a reply to me privately with a test comment. You don't need to actually send it. In fact it is better that you don't. Otherwise you might be embarrassed to see your message sent back to the list instead of as a private reply back to the author. But you can see by looking at the address when you attempt to reply that it does not go to me but is back to the list. I set Reply-To: back to the list on this particular message just for illustrative purposes. Therefore it is going to be difficult for someone to actually reply to me privately. For this reason I think setting reply-to back to the list is a bad thing. > > The whole original point of the Reply-to header is for the author > > to specify where they want replies to go, if they want them to go > > somewhere other than "From". A 'reply' is supposed to go back to the author if the message. That behavior uses the Reply-To header if present. The intention is that you can direct author replies back to an address that you want to receive those. There is a hole in functionality missing for doing group followups back to the list. How are those handled? That hole is filled by the Mail-Followup-To header. Unfortunately it is not an official standard. Just a very useful ad-hoc one in widespread use. > Fair enough, I guess. On the Debian lists, Mail-Followup-To is the > header everyone lives by. (Probably because we all use mutt) There are lots of other mailers in use. But people have configured them similarly. Mutt is just one of the better mailers and so gets many recommendations and testimonials. > I haven't figured out how to set my reply-to, so I'll just keep > reading the same thing twice. It's not half as bad as spam. :-) I could tell you. But it is a bad idea so I won't "help". But perhaps another tact? Assuming that you might be using procmail you can use the following procmail recipe to discard duplicate messages. Duplicates as indicated by the message-id header. Of course if the ML software regenerates the message-id then it defeats this but otherwise it works great for only getting one message from all of the different routes a message might take to get to you. Presumably other mail processors have similar capabilities. # Eliminate duplicate messages. :0 Wh: msgid.lock | formail -D 8192 msgid.cache Bob
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