Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3232 mails)

[William Gallafent <william@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 15 August 2006 01:02, jdow wrote:

> You send one note to the list. The LIST sends out several
> copies of your note. Generally the list benefits if
> answers go to the list rather than to the original
> sender. Therefore I feel the DEFAULT action should be to
> email the list with extra action required to move into
> private email. Otherwise, why bother to have a list?

Exactly. Hence the list family of headers of RFC2369, which
facilitate this.

I think that the RFC2822 is only deficient with respect to
list handling in as much as it doesn't talk about it at all
(which is fine, it's not necessary there). RFC2369, on the
other hand, describes headers which provide all the
necessary additional information for a client to implement
exactly what you suggest, without munging messages to give
the impression that the author had a certain intention, when
in fact that intention was of the list administrator.

So, in the situation that the list conforms with RFC2822 and
RFC2369, and the client also conforms with RFC2822 and
RFC2369, everything works exactly as you suggest (my client
is configured (by default) so that when I press "R", meaning
"Reply", to a list message, the reply is addressed to the
list). The list sets List-Post, and the client is configured
to send replies to list messages to the list.

Incidentally, the extra action you mention is simply an
alternative action - "Reply to Author" instead of
"Reply". That's exactly the action which is broken if the
list sets the Reply-To header.

Lucky the list doesn't alter the Reply-To header, or I
wouldn't have been able to divert this conversation to the
off-topic list (to which I do not subscribe ;)