[Mailman-Users] Help

[Mark Sapiro]

Mark.A.Lombardo wrote:

>I must be coming across as really thick and stupid. If I have set the tag to
>reply to poster, and I hit reply, then there is no way of mailman knowing
>which email address that came from


I'm not sure what you mean by this, but Mailman is not really involved
here other than perhaps setting a Reply-To: address. It's you and your
MUA (Outlook in your case) that decides where the reply/reply-all goes.

Consider this post of yours to the Mailman-Users list. The
Mailman-Users list is set up with 'reply to poster'. I think you
generated your post by some kind of 'reply-all' to my post. I think
this because your post has an In-Reply-To: header with the message id
of my post. It is addressed to me with a Cc: to the list, so unless
you just 'replied' to me and manually added the Cc: to the list, the
Cc: was added by the 'reply all'. Further evidence of your use of
'reply-all' is the fact that Hannah was addressed explicitly in your
initial reply to a message from me, presumably because she was
explicitly addressed in my message and you did 'reply-all'.

So anyway, I think you did 'reply-all' to my post, and the reply came
to me with Cc: to the list because my previous post had Cc: to the
list.


>So in simple terms, if I put up a subject on the mailing list and I don't
>want people to reply, it is better to put the email address in the bcc
>field.


Do you want people to be able to reply to the list in general, and just
not to this post, or do you want them to never reply to the list? The
answer really depends on that and you've never said.


>How do I set that the reply only comes to the person that posted the mail,
>and not the list, I thought setting the reply to poster it would only send
>the mal to the person who posted, and not the rest of the list. Is this not
>correct?


This depends on how the person replying does the actual replying. If
the actual reply somehow reaches the list posting address, Mailman
doesn't care how it got there or whether it was a reply to some prior
post; it treats the post as any other from that sender.


>If this is not correct, then I am confused, because that is the way it
>reads.


The configuration option only governs where a simple reply to sender
only will go - nothing else - and it does this through the content of
headers in the message only, not through any enforcement on a received
reply.


>If I set reply is sent to an explicit email address (ie mine), then if
>someone replies to an email I have sent to the list, it will send the reply
>to me.


It will actually be exactly the same as the reply to poster case if you
are the original poster. It's only different if someone else sent the
original post.


>So what happens if someone wants to reply to the whole list, and not just
>me, and I have the explicit email address set.


They do reply all, and the reply is addressed to the list and to the
explicit reply-to address and to any other addresses that were in the
To: an Cc: of the received post (except perhaps their own).

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan