OT - Mailing list headers

[John]

Martin Maney wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 11:05:34AM +0800, John wrote:
> 
>>I thought the correct use of Reply-to: was to direct replies to the 
>>correct place: in this case the list.
> 
> 
> If there were never any reason to reply off-list, you'd be right.  For

For this list, a discussion list, there rarely is.

For -announce, the appropriate reply-to is sales or eqnuiries or 
something. Mailman accommodates that too.


> the subset of users whose From: address is always valid, you're not
> wrong - see for example the Reply-To: I've chosen to set for messages
> to this list.  :-)  But that doesn't make it right all the time.
> 
> 
>>Rather than just making assertions, explain why you're right.
> 
> 
> There are people who need to use Reply-To:, and though they may be few,
> it's rude to tell them that they're screwed in order to make life
> simpler for badly-implemented tools and those who choose to use them. 
> There would be no ubuntu in such behavior.

Another assertion: When writing to a mailing list, why would they want 
to set rather than allow it to default? So far as I can see, not setting 
reply-to: works pretty well and I've not found a need to do differently 
in some years.


If you think Mozilla and derivatives are badly implemented, you should 
report it as a bug. Unless it's fixed in Ubuntu that's a good 
starting-point.

Mozilla and derivatives are used on *x, Windows and OS X, sof far as I 
know Evolution isn't available for those platforms.

The current settings demonstrably inconvenience many people - I'm not 
the only one to say so, to the benefit of a hypothetical few.

I've used kmail for some years, and having tried tbird I've decided 
kmail is badly-implemented.

I have used Evolution, but I don't think highly of that either. So I use 
the best available.


> 
> 
>>Even if you are right, the current behaviour is inconvenient for many 
>>users who have no easy way round it.
> 
> 
> You pick your [partly broken] tool, you get what you chose.  Think of
> it as the natural back-pressure on you for using a tool that's
> incomplete - encouraging you either to fix it, if you're able, or to
> replace it... or to decide to live with it because you appreciate the
> other things it does well.  It's unseemly to choose a deficent tool and
> then whine that everyone else has to adapt a work-around so as not to
> incovenience you.

As of now, I've replaced a maybe dozen email with my current choice, 
some GUI, some not. There's a lot of people who agree with my choice.