piercing corporate FW outbound

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 05:24:39AM +0900, Derek Martin wrote:
> Howdy!

Damn, foiled by annoying reply-to headers.  This reply was intended to
be private.  No harm was done in this case, as there wasn't anything
particularly sensitive or exceptionally private in this message;
though were I to intentionally send it to the list, I would have
re-worded some things.

This list carries abundant headers that allow mailers which are not
brain-dead to automatically reply to the list; therefore setting a
reply-to header is redundant and breaks the proper behavior of mailers
which are not brain-dead (which is to reply to only the sender when
the reply function is used).  People who do use brain-dead mailers are
accustomed to their mailer's brain-deadness, and so know enough to
correct for it (whether they do so or not)...

I therefore advocate that you not set a reply-to header.  If you are
such a person who things that setting reply-to headers on list
messages is a good idea, then I advocate that you investigate the
possiblity that the reason you think so is that your mailer is, in
fact, brain-dead, and consider switching to one which isn't.  Setting
reply-to on mailing list messages is an outdated solution to a stupid
problem, and hence should not be necessary; nor is it when clueful
mailers are used.

Yes, yes, I realize I should check my headers before I hit the send
key; but 99.999999% of the time (roughly) this is not necessary, since
my mailer always does the right thing, except in the exceptionally
rare case that someone goes out of their way to make it not do the
right thing by setting a reply-to header.  Human behavior being what
it is, we all know that in these rare cases, virtually no one will
notice the problem.  IMNSHO the reply-to header should ONLY be used
for its originally intended purpose: to direct mail to the sender when
it would not otherwise be possible to reply to the sender at the
address in the From: header.

And finally yes, I can actually configure my mailer to ignore reply-to
headers, but this is also not a good solution, because it causes my
mailer to fail in the case I just mentioned, where setting the
reply-to header is actually required in order for reply mail to reach
the original sender.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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