On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 10:29:14AM -0600, Dave Sherohman wrote: > On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 06:39:43PM -0600, Mike Hicks wrote: > > Erm, can you explain why Reply-To is so evil? > > Go ask google to tell you about "reply-to considered harmful". Go ask google to tell you "reply-to considered useful". I'm on lists where Reply-To doesn't get set to the list. I consider them among the most obnoxious of the lists I have to participate in. And I have to. My experience: if Reply-To is not set to the list, then one of these things happens - 1) replies don't happen because they're too much trouble to get to the list 2) Reply-All happens, and half the time the poor originator gets two copies of the reply. 3) otherwise interesting and on-topic discussions move to private e-mail, and the list never sees them 2 is really obnoxious to the original poster. 1 & 3 negatively impact community building. I've been involved in / had to deal with all of these. I consider the gains of not munging Reply-To to be nowhere near the losses. I only know of a handful of lists that don't do Reply-To munging. One is a Solaris help list - it has a strong culture of 'post your problem, collect the answers from everyone, post back a summary including what fixed it to the list'. It works there. It is one of the few scenarios where I can see it being useful - you need that really strong list culture. The other lists are alll ones where I disagree with the owner, but can't do anything, so I live with it. I don't know of any other lists where Reply-To munging isn't done. I do know of at least one group list - inhabited by strongly computer-literate techies - where they debate the topic every two or three years. And they always decide in favor. -- Scott Raun sraun at fireopal.org