[Clipart] this mailing list is configured incorrectly, likely resulting in a lot of off-list discussion

Andrew Archibald andrew.archibald at sympatico.ca
Wed Apr 13 13:24:26 PDT 2005


Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 12:44:50PM -0700, Mike Traum wrote:
> 
>>I don't really have time to look up an RFC, but every other list I've
>>been on has set the From: header to the sender and the Reply-to:
>>header to the list. I'm talking about serious lists like ones under
>>in apache, openoffice, etc. It may be in an RFC, but so are many
>>things that are not followed exactly. RFC's, in my opinion, are made
>>to be broken when it comes to useability.
>>
>>Regarding mail clients supporting reply-list, Yahoo and Mozilla
>>Thunderbird don't, which are pretty popular, I think.
> 
> Setting the reply-to to the list ends up generating more mail to the
> list that can't be undone. If you send mail to one person, you can then
> forward it to the list as well. If you send it to the list when you mean
> to just reply to the author, you can't unsend that.
> 
> If Yahoo and Thunderbird's Reply-To-All don't include the list address,
> I'd be very surprised. Well, Thunderbird at least: Yahoo screwing
> something up wouldn't surprise me.

Mozilla Thunderbird correctly includes the list address when using "reply 
to all".  When using "reply" it sends it to the "Reply-To" address.

So with the proposed change, if I want to reply to just the author of the 
post, how do I do it?  It looks like I need to manually go find their email 
address and cut and paste it into the To: field.  Not good.

Andrew



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