On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Dave Sherohman wrote:

> The canonical list of arguments against lists setting Reply-To would be 
> Chip Rosenthal's ""Reply-To" Munging Considered Harmful"[1], but that's 
> pretty ancient these days.  Google's first hit on it is a copy dated 
> 2002, but Simon Hill's response, "Reply-To Munging Considered 
> Useful"[2], dates to at least 2000, so it's clearly older than that.

It was revised in 2000, so that's how out of date it is.  But I don't 
think anything has changed since then.  Yes, there are arguments both 
ways, of course, but people here obviously like the Reply-To set to the 
list better than what we've been doing.

This argument...

> (It should use List-Post instead, as defined in RFC2369. 
> Unfortunately, well over a decade later, clients which properly 
> recognize List-Post headers remain thin on the ground.)

...doesn't impress me much because it's saying that we should accept a 
list that doesn't do what we want because our MUAs don't do what we want. 
We can fix the list, but most of us can't fix our MUAs.  Some of us could 
switch to an MUA that would do what we want, but most of us would find 
such a change much more annoying than the current list configuration.


> Put simply, if a message which is intended to be public is sent 
> privately, it causes little to no harm.  As already seen on this thread, 
> it's easy for the recipient to include it in a public response, or the 
> original sender can trivially re-send it to the correct address.  The 
> net result is a minor inconvenience for the sender (who has to send it 
> twice) and possibly a minor annoyance for the private version's 
> recipient (who will receive two copies unless their mail software is 
> smart enough to filter out the duplicate).

How many of one type of error should I prefer to one of the other kind? 
Accidentally not sending to the list is happening a lot.  Accidentally 
sending to the list usually isn't a problem.  When people reply to a TCLUG 
message with something they don't want the list to see, they usually take 
special care not to send to the list.  I know I do.

Keeping things as they are does not prevent people from accidentally 
sending to the list.  It is easy to do that -- just use "reply to all" 
accidentally and you've done it.  You can't protect us from that.

As it is, I cannot reply only to the list.  I'm using Alpine.  My options 
are Reply to All or Reply to Sender.  When there is a Reply-To, I have 
another option, which is to reply only to the Reply-To address.  I like 
having more options.

One problem is that some people set "Reply-To" when they send their 
messages to the list.  I don't like that because I want to reply to the 
list, so it would help me if the list would overwrite their Reply-To with 
the list address.

Mike