Gmail account and this mailinglist

Satish Balay balay at fastmail.fm
Tue Nov 23 16:38:19 UTC 2004


On Tue, 23 Nov 2004, Jonathan Berry wrote:

> I prefer to get the personal email since it makes it easier to tell
> when someone has replied to my message.

I guess you woun't see this message as I'll remove your address from
the receipent list and retain just the list address :)

> I am on another list that does not do the Reply-To spoofing, and I
> like this much better.  

Yeah - I subscribe to one such list - and I hate this default
behavior.

> To reply to the email, you use the Reply to All option and the email
> goes to the list and the author.  I don't think this would work very
> well with as many "newbies" as there are, and no doubt there would
> be many emails not sent to the list that were meant to be (by
> experienced users as well as newbies, I'm sure).  I don't want to
> start a flame war, just pointing out that there are alternatives.

<feeding the flamewar>

In mailing lists - (for both newbees & experienced users) - the 99% of
the replies should be back to the list - so my belief is - modifying
the 'reply-to' by the list is the correct thing. (I guess fedora-list
should strip off previous 'reply-to' - and avoid this gmail fiasco -
there are some individual users - who also set reply-to field as well)

For the remaining 1% replies - where the reply shouldn't go to the
list - there should be an additional feature in the e-mail client
'reply-to-author' which ignores the 'reply-to' field - and just
replies to the 'from:author' filed.

All the docs on the web which claim 'reply-to' is evil ignore this
simple fact (optimize for common use) - and grumble - I can't
reply-to-author - so 'reply-to' is evil.

For the 1% case - I'll sugest - just emulate that behavior by using
'forward function' & copy/paste the address.

Satish




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