Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 14:33:07 +0100 (MET)
From: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
To: ietf-drums <drums@cs.utk.edu>
Subject: Clarify amibuities
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951206142804.29273A-100000@ester.dsv.su.se>
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Sorry if I go back to the old issue of reply-to again.

The reason I do it is that Keith said at the drums meeting
at IETF yesterday, that one of the major goals of the drums
group is to remove ambiguities in the e-mail standards.

I guess everyone agrees after the discussion we have
had, that reply-to is ambiguous. And to resolve this
by just saying that "reply-to gives the e-mail address
to which the sender wants replies to be sent" does *not*
remove that ambiguity.

If we really want to perform what we are meant to do, i.e.
to remove ambiguities, then we will have to

(1) Either select one of the ambiguous uses as the only
permitted. This is obviously impossible to get consensus on.

(2) Deprecate the whole header.

(3) Replace the command with two or more new headers,
one for each of the ambiguous meanings.

The worst thing I know about standards is vague statements
and ambiguous statements, especially if these have been
put into the standard in order to reach conensus on
controversial issues. But that is exactly what we
will do if we keep the ambiguity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme