To: kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)
Cc: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: Replying to a mailing list 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "08 Apr 1997 22:43:00 +0200."
             <6UTmihWUcsB@khms.westfalen.de> 
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Date: Wed, 09 Apr 1997 10:02:55 -0500
Message-Id: <509.860598175@aussie.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
From: Robert Elz <kre@cs.mu.oz.au>


| For another perspective - one mailing list I'm on regularly got mail from  
| someone saying "Please don't CC me when replying to the list" - and then  
| some time later, someone else had his mails say "Please always CC me when  
| replying to the list".

All this is because almost no-one does the right thing with Reply-To.
To get rid of this noise in mail items, all we need to do is get rational
Reply-To support into the clients (and avoid lists and stuff messing with
the header).  In the first case the author sticks in

	Reply-To: list@server

in the second the author says
	
	Reply-To: list@server, me@elsewhere

and then any client should, by default, send replies exactly where the
author wanted.   Mailing lists should absolutely not then go out of their
way to depeat this.

And no Jacob - there's no requirement whatever that the person replying
obey that request, it is just a request from the author, which should be
assisted by the recipients UA.   If the person sending the reply decides that
they want to reply only to the list, or only to the author, or always to
both, then they do that, nothing we can do can stop them, even if we wanted,
which we don't.

| If anything, I think we should say that for composing a reply, people  
| should have a choice about which header fields to search for addresses

That's fine too, but that is just a UA design issue.
 
| Of course, it might be a nice feature to configure different defaults for  
| specific situations, but I think that is far outside the scope of drums.

It isn't out of scope to define what Reply-To is, and how it should be used.
It is to get into UA design.  I think the text in the msg-fmt doc is OK now,
it could possibly do with a little more wording to help UA authors do the
sane thing, but technically as it is now is fine.

kre