[Mailman-Developers] Reply-To munging considered *carefully*

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 13, 2009, at 7:15 PM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> I would say that if ML software _always_ overrides reply-to, even when
> the author explicitly provided one, then that is broken.

Aside from the other problems that have been pointed out, selectively  
overriding Reply-to makes the mailing list behavior almost impossible  
to predict.  Whatever the legitimate pros and cons for always munging  
or never munging, at least it's predictable without the user having to  
hunt around in the Reply-To or being ultra-careful with their Send  
button, neither of which will happen for Real Users in the real world.

> Even better, this eliminates the problem of:
>
> I post message A without reply-to:
>
>  To: ml at example.org
>  From: mbt at zest.trausch.us
>
> Someone responds with message B and hits reply-all, also without
> reply-to:
>
>  To: mbt at zest.trausch.us
>  Cc: ml at example.org
>  From: user at example.org
>
> And then I don't get a message with a List-Post header _at all_.  That
> is one failing that your algorithm cannot fix, unless the ML sends its
> second copy (and most MLs are configured not to do so, because users
> find it inconvenient).

Mailman leaves it up to the user to suppress the list copy if they are  
explicitly named on a recipient header.  The downside of course is  
that the mailing list cannot suppress the off-list copy because it  
never sees it, so the only possibility is to suppress the copy with  
all the helpful mailing list bling.

Of course, you can always use an MUA such as Gmail that "helpfully"  
suppresses messages with duplicate Message-IDs.  I put that in quote  
because it's a FAQ that Gmail users never even see the list-copy of  
their own postings, and they often don't know if their message made it  
to the list.

-Barry

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