Matt Emson wrote: > Why does Thunderbird always send to individuals rather than the list for > this mailing list? Weird! It's due to a grotesque misunderstanding. It's an article of faith among strict mail gurus that replies should always go back to the sender, and any variance from this is regarded as meddling (see the rant at http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html) A discussion list (where readers expect replies by default to go back to the whole list) should automatically set a Reply-To pointing at the list address, unless the sender has included an explicit Reply-To of their own. A notification/announcement list should set the Reply-To back to the sender (again, unless otherwise specified by the sender). The argument that readers should use Reply-to-all for the purpose of sending a reply to the list, or that they should use a mail program with a special Reply-to-list is entirely fallacious, and based on the assumption that only console mailers like ucb/mail or character-cell mailers like elm, pine, or mutt are "real" mailers and that anyone using GUI mailers is inherently in the wrong. The supporters of the reply-to-sender default regard adding a Reply-To to the list as pandering to the broken mailers of the world (of which there are many). A normal mailing-list reader should NOT have to make a mental decision each time they write a reply: the Reply-To header ought to have been set appropriately by the mailing list. But it won't change. It's up to the owners of mailing lists to set the appropriate default at the time the list is set up. All my LISTSERV lists, for example, are set appropriately for the type of list involved. ///Peter
