From: "William Gallafent" <william@gallaf.net>
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.
Remember that carrier pigeons have a higher RFC number, today, than your precious 2369. Default behavior has been to use the Reply-to header if it is present falling back on the From header. Making a change in the default behavior is bad. And making the default behavior different than users expect is bad. Hence presuming that the List- headers in 2369 mean they are to be used in place of Reply-to is a little ingenuous to say the least.
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.
No - that violates the principle of "least surprise." It is bad UI design.
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 ;)
Didn't work. I rewrite the headers on the way in. {^,-} Joanne