On Fri, Feb 18, 2000 at 12:50:05PM -0500, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote: > I think that this sort of munging would be a good idea. Duplicate replies > bother me, and that's the default behavior for a list such as this > one. Howver, don't flame me about it, just read this essay for an > alternative point of view to "Reply-to Munging Considered Harmful", which > I'm sure you've all read. Useful isn't the opposite of Harmful, and I wonder if he realises that... The classic paper is "Goto considered harmful", which doesn't deny that it's a useful feature but just tells us why we shouldn't use it, and I think RtMCH is written with a similar intention. RtMCH notes that it would be a good idea if mailers got smarter, and since it was written they have - Mutt and AFAIK the Emacs mailer are quite capable of replying to a list (look at this mail, generated by Mutt, for an example) without doing group reply... The paper you (Glyph) linked says you should demand "reply to vs from address" options in your mailer, which breaks the explicit purpose of Reply-To:, instead I suggest that you demand "reply to list" features in your mailer, and demand X-Reply-To-List or an equivalent. If someone knows of an X-Reply-To-List equivalent which is being actively used I'd appreciate a private reply about it, and similarly if you know a reason not to have such an X-header. If people are going to tinker with lists, their #1 priority should be to ensure that spoofed subscriptions fail harmlessly, this is now becoming a huge problem (I think gimp-devel is OK here) Nick.
