[H-GEN] A request to the list maintainers

Tony Nugent tony at linuxworks.com.au
Thu Feb 13 20:38:36 EST 2003


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Is this rumour true that the humbug mailing list software is about
to be changed?   (Just curious).

On Fri Feb 14 2003 at 10:07, Greg Black wrote:

> Sandra Milne wrote:
> 
> | At 07:38 14/02/2003 +1000, Greg Black wrote:
> | >1. Drop the "Reply-To" header munging that is currently carried
> | >    out.  Rather than waste space here with the arguments, I will
> | >    refer you to this excellent article by Chip Rosenthal:
> |
> | How do I reply to the list if the reply-to field isn't set?
> 
> You could have read the URL I posted before stating an objection
> that is quite clearly covered there.  If you didn't have time to
> do that, why did you make time to get in first with an objection?

>     http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

While I can sympathise with the general thrust of what is said in
that article, I don't particularly agree with much of it (and it
does come across as a passionate but one-sided argument).

IMHO, for mailing lists a reply-to isn't such a bad thing.  The
simple fact is almost all large mailing lists do use it (for good
reasons).

BTW, I've had that URL in my own bookmarks for a long time.  And
also this one right underneath it:

	http://www.metasystema.org/essays/reply-to-useful.mhtml

It doesn't bother me what happens, but my vote would be for it to
stay.

> By the way, I'd have replied directly to Sandra if it were not
> for the reply-to munging and the extra hoops that I've had to
> jump through.  See the previously-mentioned article:

Procmail is your friend...

# --- modify any Reply-To: header lines ---
:0HfW
* ^Reply-[Tt]o:
| formail -R Reply-to X-reply-to 

and then get your mailer[1] to include the X-reply-to header in the
reply message so that you can edit it appropriately.

  [1] Greg, I know you use exmh so this would be relatively trivial
      for you to do: add this to your replycomps...

      %<{x-reply-to}X-Reply-to: %{x-reply-to}\n%>\

> Greg

Cheers
Tony

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