Please don't munge ‘Reply-To’

[Ben Finney]

Vincent Ladeuil <v.ladeuil+lp at free.fr> writes:

> John want the *sender* ('when sending announcements' refers to the
> release managers, not the mailing list software) of the announce to
> set the Reply-To, nobody talked about changing mailing list
> settings.

Ah, I misunderstood in that case.

John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:

> Specifically, the bazaar at lists.canonical.com mailing list does *not*
> munge the Reply-to: field. Because of this, it is recommended practice
> to always use "Reply-to-all" rather than just "Reply".

(Side point: Better to use the “Reply-to-list” function which makes
direct use of the ‘List-Post’ field to figure out what address to use
for posting to the list. Mail clients which don't have such a function
are to have their vendors beaten with RFC 2369 until they comply.)

> However, for announcements, it generally goes to several low-volume
> announce lists. And responders should not be replying to those
> lists. (In general, they are moderated, and humans will manually
> filter them out, but it is a pain for the moderators.)

This is still an abuse of ‘Reply-To’ (which indicates where the sender
suggests *individual* responses should be addressed), but admittedly
one which doesn't have a good alternative; ‘Mail-Followup-To’ is the
closest but is neither recommended by IETF nor is it clearly the right
answer.

> So the only time I'm suggesting it is when sending to low-volume
> announce lists, which are not meant for general use.

My apologies for the misunderstanding then, and I retract my
complaint. Thanks for setting me straight.

-- 
 \            “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” |
  `\                       —Melvin Kranzberg's First Law of Technology |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney