[H-GEN] A request to the list maintainers

[Greg Black]

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Tony Nugent wrote:

| On Fri Feb 14 2003 at 10:07, Greg Black wrote:
| 
| >     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).

I don't think this is true.  Of the mailing lists I subscribe
to, only one (not a large one, but one that both Tony and I
subscribe to) outside the Humbug lists does reply-to munging.
E.g., the FreeBSD lists are huge and none of them do it.

| > 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 

The point about this, and why it really sucks, is that it
destroys any genuine Reply-To header that the original sender
might have placed in the message.

Let's say I'm in Melbourne at a customer site and send a message
to a list.  It will, as always, be "From" my usual posting
address; but I might want to control where the answers go and so
I put something like this in the headers:

    Reply-To: list at foo.org, boss at customer.com

That way, my customer (who is not on the list) will receive any
responses and they will also go to the list.  However, a list
that goes in for mail mutilation will change my header so that
it reads:

    Reply-To: list at foo.org

And so the person who I expected to see the replies just won't
see them.  As far as I'm concerned, this is evil.

The purpose of the Reply-To header is precisely to allow senders
to specify destinations for replies that are different from the
defaults that might be inferred from the From, To, Cc, etc.,
headers.

| 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%>\

Sure, it would have been easy for me to do and I actually told a
little lie this morning -- it was just a nice example of the
kind of thing I was talking about.  And my exmh setup is far
removed from standard, so its peculiarities are not widely
available.  But that's a topic for another list.

Greg

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