[OT] Reply-To munging considered *carefully*

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Reply-To set to me.  Please verify that your replies are going to the
intended place.

Michael B. Trausch writes:

 > Whee, I remembered to click the damn toolbar this time.

:-)

 > In any case, it's off-topic, and unless others here are interested
 > in the discussion, or there's a chance that the ML config would be
 > changed, it's probably best just to drop it altogether.

I'm not sure where discussion will take place.  Not here, possibly
Mailman Developers ML, most likely wiki.list.org.  Drop me a line and
I'll make sure that you're notified about the new venue.  It will
probably be Saturday or so.

As long as I'm here, let me respond.

 > I've seen that argument before; it's fine, but the ideal situation is
 > impossible to achieve (some form of complete consistency amongst all
 > mailing lists globally).

The draft RFC admits that.  It's not a panacea, it's a path forward.

The problem to date, AFAICT from the litter on the path to RFC 2822,
is that a lot of people want a way to indicate that responses SHOULD
go to the list (of course you can't *force* them to go to the list).
They have insisted on coopting Reply-To and Mail-Followup-To for that
purpose because they are existing headers that many MUAs already
respect.  This breaks their usage as defined in the RFCs, so the
cooler heads have refused to sanction such usage.  They are for the
*author* to indicate where personal replies and public discussion,
respectively, should be conducted.

The upshot is that there is no RFC-sanctioned way for a list to say
"please respond here", and no way at all that doesn't usurp *both* the
author's and the receiver's options.

The intention is to fix that.  I already have agreement in principle
from the Mailman boss to implement for that list manager.  I will
provide an implementation of my algorithm that can be used in Emacs
MUAs.  I'm sure I can get VM and MH-E to adopt it, and almost sure
Gnus will.  The KDE KMail guy has expressed interest.  Both seemed to
think my proposal is actually novel, but I certainly will check the
IETF archives in order to frame it properly in existing discussion.

 > On the topic of the discussion, though, what is better for all is a
 > default behavior that is correct, say, 95% of the time for 95% of the
 > people.

My algorithm gives that by default.  The draft RFC gives a way for a
mailing list to either insist on public followup or to strongly
discourage it.

Steve