On Saturday 01 April 2006 21:56, Hylton Conacher(ZR1HPC) wrote: [snip]
The point of the list is not to sent private messages to one another, it is to send the messages to a group of subscribers about a common topic.
Absolutely! :)
If subscribers want to sent each other private messages then there is nothing stopping them 'Replying to all' and editing out the mailing list address. [snip]
Exactly! With the current configuration, that is true. With what I infer is your preferred configuration (list sets Reply-To), it is not true. The case which fails is that in which a subscriber sends a message with From not equal to Reply-To, and is only able to receive replies at the Reply-To address, i.e. is not able to receive mail from the internet at the From address. This is exactly why the mailing list must not set the Reply-To header. If it does, and I (a sender to the list) am relying on the Reply-To header of my submission containing an email address at which I can receive emails, i.e. my "real" internet email address, then this information will be lost if the list overwrites the Reply-To header. If it is the case that my From address does not reach me, which is entirely possible, though less common these days than it used to be, then you _need_ _my_ Reply-To header to survive in order to be able to contact me directly. It seems to be true that messages with From != Reply-to used to be more common than they are now. Often, it was because the From address was internal and machine-specific (or internal email-system-specific), and that a corporate or academic email gateway (or the user's email client) would add the Reply-To header so replies could be routed correctly. For example, I seem to remember seeing emails with headers like: From: gallafnt@teaching12.physics.ox.ac.uk Reply-To: william.gallafent@physics.ox.ac.uk (That may not be exactly right, because it's been a while (!), but you get the idea). Teaching12 is a workstation, which probably can't route mail. I need my mail to be sent to the Reply-To address, so that the central physics.ox.ac.uk mail gateway gets it and routes it correctly. If you send an email to the From address from the outside world, it just won't get there. That example is quite mild - I remember seeing all sorts of weird addresses in From lines, with a "real" internet email address in Reply-To. Anyway, this discussion has drifted off topic, as it always does (though I don't always join in). Perhaps a meta-list for discussing the configuration of the list is called for ;) -- Bill Gallafent.