[H-GEN] software runs the world

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Sat Mar 19 09:05:04 EST 2005


On 2005-03-19, Russell Stuart wrote:

> I plan to automate it when I get a new laptop.  I will be
> using Debian on it, with exim.  Exim makes it fairly easy to
> rewrite addresses on the way through.

There are no addresses to re-write here.  We're talking about
adding a Reply-To header on email that you send, not about
changing anything on email that you receive.

> I did think about how I could re-write the reply to address
> with my existing sendmail / Red Hat setup, but I could not 
> think of way that only required the tiny amount of work 
> you say it does.

I made no statement about doing that, since we weren't talking
about that (although it is of course trivial[1], but wrong, to
do).

You should not even be considering re-writing any Reply-To
address.  If incoming email has a Reply-To header, then you're
supposed to leave it alone -- it's there so your MUA can
construct a To header correctly (and that's the reason why
mailing lists aren't supposed to touch it either).  What we're
talking about here is adding your own Reply-To header to email
that you compose.

> Of course its is entirely possible you 
> know more about Unix and programming than I do, but I have 
> to balance that thought against the fact that you have not 
> done it, despite programming being second nature to you.

I said it's not worth it and it's not in my opinion.  You
certainly need to understand this stuff better than you do if
you're going to try to automate it.

In fact, I partially automate it.  My MUA puts an empty Reply-To
header in each draft message that it creates.  If the message
warrants a reply-To header I cut and paste the one I want into
that field (a really trivial mouse gesture on X11 and a mildly
annoying set of keystrokes and mouse gestures on stupid OS X).
If I leave it empty, the MUA deletes it before sending the
message.  Since I like to consider the headers on all messages I
send, this suits the way I do things.  Automating it further
would serve no purpose for me.

Cheers, Greg

[1] Trivial using procmail, maildrop, etc.  Equally trivial as a
    script using RFC2822 libraries in Perl, Python, etc., to
    write a script that checks for some chosen header, extracts
    data from it and constructs some other header.  But, in the
    context of this discussion, still wrong.




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