Backup Central

David Kågedal wrote:
Because reply-to specifies the address to send replies back to the
sender of the original mail. Why would the mailing list software
change that when the sender is the only one who could possible have an
opinion about it?

When writing an answer to an email to a mailing, you either want to
send a reply to the person who wrote the email, or you want to send a
follow-up to the list. There is no way for the mailing list software
to guess what you might want to do, and mailing lists that add a
reply-to that points to the list effectively removes one of the two
choices for you.


That may be, this is the only mailing list I'm active on which does that. When
you ask a question in a public place, it would make sense to put the answer
there too, for others to see, right? If no-one would send replies back to the
list, you'd get a list full of questions, but no answers. That shouldn't be the
case... IMO, the default reply address should be that of the list.

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005, Wiebe Cazemier wrote:

[..]
IMO, the default reply address should be that of the list.

While it's not always wrong, it's most certainly a Bad Idea (tm) to mess
with Reply-to: headers.

Most email clients provide two reply functions: "reply to sender", and
"reply to all". Inserting a Reply-to: header changes the behaviour of the
"reply to sender" function. As such, mailing list software shouldn't ever
want to touch it.

So, no offense, but I don't think it's the task of the mailing list
software to compensate for subscribers clicking the wrong reply-button.


Regards,
Maarten

Wiebe Cazemier <halfgaar < at > gmail.com>
wrote the following on Sat, 15 Oct 2005 17:00:07 +0200

That may be, this is the only mailing list I'm active on which does
that. When you ask a question in a public place, it would make sense
to put the answer there too, for others to see, right? If no-one
would send replies back to the list, you'd get a list full of
questions, but no answers. That shouldn't be the case... IMO, the
default reply address should be that of the list.

As far as I know there is no consensus here, and different lists have
different default settings. I'm definitely on some lists which don't
add a Reply-To, and maybe the majority are like that. It might be
annoying if this list acts differently than the others you are on, but
it does make some sense to me:

1) If you do want to send a private message, it's easier since you
can just Reply. (If you want to send to the list you can reply to
all, which is also easy.)

2) When you reply-to all, the specific people in the thread get
mentioned in the To: or Cc: field. The way my email works, a
message can get stored in multiple folders at the same time. If
I'm in the To: or Cc: field a message gets more attention that if
it's just in a mailing list folder.

Of course in the rdiff-backup list I read all the messages anyway,
but for some lists I may want to only read certain messages, or
may wait a month before trying to catch up.

Hmm some people may have the ability to subscribe to certain
threads, which probably works similarly, but I don't have this
functionality.

3) Auto-responders (like vacation bots) don't spam the lists as much
as they otherwise would.


--
Ben Escoto