List header cancer (was: Lawsuits, Red Hat, yummy....)

[Jeff Macdonald]

On 10/18/07, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
>   A million years ago, this list took a vote, and the "harmful"
> faction won.  I'm really uninterested in repeating the debate unless
> there is significant evidence a change in opinion has occurred, and
> AFAICT, no such evidence exists.

Yes, I was here for that. I'm just saying that maybe the behaviour you
are seeing and disliking is a side effect of not have the list set
'Reply-To:'.

> > Hmmm... if a message has multiple Reply-To's, why not have the MUA
> > reply to all of them?
>
>   RFC-2822 does allow multiple addresses to be specified in the
> Reply-To header, so I suppose list software could add to an existing
> Reply-To, rather than replacing it.  But that just makes the whole
> "How to handle list replies" picture even muddier, so I'm not sure how
> that helps.  And it still doesn't prevent List Header Cancer.

I thought one of the objections to Lists using Reply-To was that
Author of the message could set that to some other address and the
List software would cause the value to be lost. Having multple
Reply-To's means just that, send a response to multiple address. So
I'm lost on how that makes things muddier.

Hitting a Reply-To All button means Reply to all addresses listed in
To, Reply-To, CC, etc. fields. There will always be people who hit
that button at the wrong time. But today when responding to this list,
I would have to take extra steps to keep the 'cancer' at bay.

Anyhow, I don't really care either way. I do find it interesting that
after all these years, MUAs and Lists still don't play nice with each
other.

-- 
Jeff Macdonald
Ayer, MA