Re: [SLE] Re: Why no Reply-to?

On Saturday 01 April 2006 21:56, Hylton Conacher(ZR1HPC) wrote:
[snip]
The point of the list is not to sent private messages to
one another, it is to send the messages to a group of
subscribers about a common topic.

Absolutely! :)

If subscribers want to sent each other private messages
then there is nothing stopping them 'Replying to all' and
editing out the mailing list address.
[snip]

Exactly!

With the current configuration, that is true. With what I
infer is your preferred configuration (list sets Reply-To),
it is not true. The case which fails is that in which a
subscriber sends a message with From not equal to Reply-To,
and is only able to receive replies at the Reply-To address,
i.e. is not able to receive mail from the internet at the
From address.

This is exactly why the mailing list must not set the
Reply-To header. If it does, and I (a sender to the list) am
relying on the Reply-To header of my submission containing
an email address at which I can receive emails, i.e. my
"real" internet email address, then this information will be
lost if the list overwrites the Reply-To header. If it is
the case that my From address does not reach me, which is
entirely possible, though less common these days than it
used to be, then you _need_ _my_ Reply-To header to survive
in order to be able to contact me directly.

It seems to be true that messages with From != Reply-to used
to be more common than they are now. Often, it was because
the From address was internal and machine-specific (or
internal email-system-specific), and that a corporate or
academic email gateway (or the user's email client) would
add the Reply-To header so replies could be routed
correctly.

For example, I seem to remember seeing emails with headers
like:

From: gallafnt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Reply-To: william.gallafent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

(That may not be exactly right, because it's been a while
(!), but you get the idea). Teaching12 is a workstation,
which probably can't route mail. I need my mail to be sent
to the Reply-To address, so that the central
physics.ox.ac.uk mail gateway gets it and routes it
correctly. If you send an email to the From address from the
outside world, it just won't get there. That example is
quite mild - I remember seeing all sorts of weird addresses
in From lines, with a "real" internet email address in
Reply-To.

Anyway, this discussion has drifted off topic, as it always
does (though I don't always join in). Perhaps a meta-list
for discussing the configuration of the list is called for
;)

--
Bill Gallafent.


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