Carbon Copies (CC's)

[Nick Simicich]

At 02:15 AM 2003-01-19 +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:

>Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com> writes:

> > Now *this* is why I think the guy who wrote "Reply-To Munging Considered
> > Harmful" is full of it.

Many of us feel that way. A significant percentage do not.  However, the 
point that you are making, and the one that the RTMCH author simply refused 
to acknowledge was that there is no other provision in the RFC822 headers 
for directing mailing list replies.  In fact, if you read RFC822, section 
4.4.3, this is specifically one of the uses that Reply-to was to be used for:

 >        A somewhat different use may be of some help to "text message
 >        teleconferencing" groups equipped with automatic distribution
 >        services: include the address of that service in the "Reply-
 >        To" field of all messages submitted to the teleconference;
 >        then participants can "reply" to conference submissions to
 >        guarantee the correct distribution of any submission of their
 >        own.

There is some discussion about author and reply-to, but it is clear to me 
that for all reasonable mailing lists, the MLM is the author.  It is the 
author because almost all MLM setups do some content control and will also 
not relay messages but for a specific list of people, etc., and it is 
reasonable because the bounces should go to the MLM, and not to the person 
who submitted the mailing list entry and because you need to insure that 
you are not a spam amplifier.  I also see that they suggested that the 
submitter set reply-to, but the reality is that then you are at some 
stranger's mercy, and you can't depend on people editing their headers when 
they hit reply, so setting reply-to properly can only be done by the service.

I generally fix stuff from mailing lists in maildrop - I insert a reply-to 
and depending on the list, I either strip it to plain text with demime or I 
do not. But the reality is that I have been forced to set my default 
reply-to to all because I do not add reply-to for all lists.

> > If replies aren't set to go back to the list,
> > people just hit "group reply", and sends a message to the author, cc'ed to
> > the list and an ever growing list of other people on the cc list from
> > previous group replies.  But when it came to a vote on this list, I was
> > shouted down, so learn to live with duplicate messages, or screen them out
> > with procmail and formail.
>
>That's exactly the problem Mail-Followup-To: strives to fix -- or "List
>Reply" buttons in mail user agents. (Some will also use group reply to mean
>list reply when they see list headers.)

You know?  If all (or even most) mailing lists set reply-to, then most 
people would be able to run with non-group reply, because individual mail 
would go to individuals and mailing list mail would go to mailing 
lists.  There are all sorts of other things you can so, or that various 
MUAs have done. But the thing that everyone ends up on is group reply, and 
then editing the headers, but they always forget to edit the headers, and 
some misinformed purist will always jump on people who suggest that maybe, 
just maybe, we should follow RFC822 the way it was written and change 
RFC822.  By the way, I run a couple dozen mailing lists, all have reply-to 
set, and the false spectre of individual replies going to the group is just 
that.  It happens once every couple of months, while the piles of extra 
messages happen every day.

--
If you doubt that magnet therapy works, I put to you this observation: When 
refrigerators were first invented, in the 1940s, they were rather 
unreliable, but then they became significantly more reliable. The basic 
design of the refrigerator did not change, and we all know that quality was 
important back then, so I doubt that newer refrigerators are made better. 
Refrigerators have become more reliable because of the rise of the 
refrigerator magnet.
Nick Simicich - njs at scifi.squawk.com