To: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
Cc: ietf-drums <drums@cs.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: Clarify amibuities 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 08 Dec 1995 14:28:48 BST."
             <Pine.SUN.3.91.951208142216.15708P-100000@ester.dsv.su.se> 
Date: Sat, 09 Dec 1995 01:53:53 +1100
Message-Id: <4838.818434433@munnari.OZ.AU>
From: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>


    Is not that what you meant?

Yes, basically.

    But note that that is not the way Reply-To is used today.

It is the way I use it today...   I know it doesn't work very
well, which is why the thing needs some kind of fix.

    Today, Reply-To is sometimes meant
    for replies intended for the sender only, sometimes for replies
    intended for all recipients, even in cases where both kinds of
    replies are possible and can occur!

I have been pondering, overnight, the nature of a "reply".  I
have come to the (perhaps radical) conclusion, that in general
only one address is ever really (usually) appropriate for a "reply"
in the proper sense of that word.   Eg: if I ask if you want to go
out to lunch, your answers may be yes/no/maybe/defer/... and that
would be a reply.  I can decide (as sender of the query) just
where that response should go (to my appointments secretary, had I
the luxury of owning such a beast...), that is Reply-To:.

Any other response is not a "reply", it is just a new message that
happens to be sent because of a message I sent.   If you were to
want to say "Shouldn't we also invite Keith?" that would not be a
reply to my message, but a new message to me.

What I am getting to is that I believe we're overloading "reply"
as a user interface function available to users, the multiple
different "reply" buttons that are sometimes postulated are almost
certainly not "reply" buttons at all, but "create new message"
buttons.   Those could use any addresses from the message to
initially seed the destination address fields without bothering
anyone (they would also not add "in reply to" stuff which I
constantly need to edit out of my messages when I "reply" in this
kind of situation).

Is this kind of thinking something that can perhaps let us see
some light at the end of this particular tunnel?

kre