Why no reply-to header?

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 04:39:06PM -0400, Phillip Susi wrote:
> What on earth is 'reply to list'?  An RFC compliant MUA is supposed to
> have two options; one that replies only to the sender or the address
> specified in the Mail-followup-to: header if present, and one that
> retains the list of Cc'd addresses.

This is a rather inaccurate statement; "RFC compliant" is pretty strong,
considering that there /are/ no RFCs that specify a "Mail-Folloup-To"
header (there _really_ ought to be, though).

There are also, AFAICT, no RFCs that dictate how an MUA must handle
replies, only RFCs which attach semantics to mail headers that /suggest/
(via SHOULD) how an MUA might handle replies.

Having said that, I nonetheless agree that having the list manager
program add Mail-Followup-To (and, probably, more standard-compliant
List-Post) headers is the best way to deal with the issue. Reply-To's
are explicitly meant to be set by the /author/ of a message, and thus
shouldn't be set by list managers.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/