Bug in mailing lists; unfriendly to non-subscribers

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Jul 05, 2010 at 14:57:33 +0300,
  Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Public mailing lists should receive mail from *anybody*; if the poster
> is not subscribed, then the message should go through moderation. This
> is the truly open way.

There are costs in doing that. Either in increased spam or increased workload
for moderators. Some Fedora lists do allow for moderators to approve
messages that have been held. I think it is the minority of lists that
both hold the posts and have good moderation.

> Orthogonal to this is that the mailing lists should not mingle with
> "Reply-To"; they should leave the To and Cc fields intact, so that the
> MUA can reply to the right addresses. See:
> http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

I'm with you on that, but currently the people in charge have decided that
that is a better way for this list to function. I am pretty sure they
are aware of the arguments, so that a long argument about this setting
isn't going to be beneficial.

People that don't like that can strip the reply-to headers locally. That's
what I do so that my reply button works correctly. (As much as is possible
after the real reply-to headers have been stripped.)