Message-Id: <199710062040.QAA17189@spot.cs.utk.edu>
From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
to: drums@cs.utk.edu
cc: moore@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: elaborating on Dan's "simple reply" concept 
In-reply-to: Your message of "06 Oct 1997 19:37:23 -0000."
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Date: Mon, 06 Oct 1997 16:40:02 -0400
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> (Please don't send me extra copies of your messages, Keith.)

I'll try to remember, though it would certainly help if you had a way
to specify this behavior to my UA...  of course, you could have
said
"Reply-To: drums@cs.utk.edu"
but you didn't choose to do that.  Why not?

> > what do you do with Reply-To for cases other
> > than 'simple reply'...in particular, the nebulous 'followup' case?
> 
> There's nothing nebulous about followups.

Followup in usenet generally means "reply to recipients only"
Followup in email probably means "reply to author and all recipients"
but the term has never been defined.

People tend to lump "followup" and "reply to all" and "reply to group"
together as if they were the same thing.  They're not.

> People send messages to the author (as shown in Reply-To, defaulting to
> From) and all the recipients (as shown in To and Cc), to the annoyance
> of the author if he's included in a recipient mailing list.
> 
> The annoyance will be eliminated if MUAs support a Reply-To-All field as
> described in http://pobox.com/~djb/proto/replyto.html.

And as I've indicated in earlier message, I think such a field would
do more harm than good.

> > By definition, a ``reply'' to a subject message, is a new message
> > issued in response to the content of the subject message.   If
> > a subject message includes a Message-Id field, a reply to that
> > message SHOULD contain an In-Reply-To field which includes that 
> > Message-Id.
> 
> This is a separate issue, which I believe we can easily handle by
> defining an appropriate term, such as ``old-fashioned threaded reply.''

I mentioned In-Reply-To just to point out that there is a little more
at issue here than the different types of reply commands, not because
I think that the description of In-Reply-To handling belongs in the
description of the Reply-To field.

> > User agents intended for use by human beings SHOULD support
> > simply reply and followup commands,
> 
> No. This is not within the DRUMS bailiwick.

I don't see any harm with having DRUMS recommend UA behavior, as long
as it doesn't mandate UA behavior.  Maybe it should be a lower case
"should" rather than an upper case SHOULD.

Keith