Re: Meta question w/rt list

[Bob Proulx]

Linda Walsh wrote:
> Would it be a bad thing to set mail-list software to automatically
> default to the list as the 'default' response, and the user would
> have to address an email, manually, to not respond to the list?

If there were a good mail header to use then it would be a good thing.
But there isn't and so people try to (ab)use one of the existing ones
which actually, yes, would be a bad thing.  In particular the most
common one that people try to use is the Reply-To header.  But the
Reply-To header already has a use and it breaks too many things when
trying to force fit the mailing list into it.

  http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful

The best header would be the ad-hoc standard (not officially standard
but most used for this) Mail-Followup-To header.

  http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html

The Mail-Followup-To header would be set by the sender to indicate
where followups should be sent.  That would handle the case where the
user wants replies to go only to the mailing list and also the case
where the sender wishes to receive an explicit copy of the message.

Unfortunately not being forced upon MUA authors the Mail-Followup-To
header is not adopted in some very high profile mail clients.  Sigh.
If it were then we could put this problem behind us.

Until then I think it is sufficient simply to educate people about
proper usenet mail etiquette.  It is not that difficult.  Better that
most of the time things work correctly and that sometimes people break
things than to break the system such that it can't ever work properly.

This topic comes up about every six months.  Search the mailing list
archives of any list for past discussions.

Bob