Earl Ruby writes:
I've read back through this thread, and forgive me if this has been discussed before, but have you considered giving subscribers the option of deciding for themselves whether their replies should go to the list or to the poster?
No, I hadn't considered it, and upon consideration I would add it to the RFC only with a gun to my head (or equivalents such as demands from multiple list management software developers).
The functionality you propose is *already available* to posters by setting Reply-To, and that method should be encouraged for posters who care because the poster already has the *per-message* knowledge of what is appropriate.
I'm aware that many posters are in love with their Message-User-Agent- That-Sucks[tm] and don't have that functionality available to them by default. That is not a problem I can solve, and I'm not going to try to solve it in the RFC. A better way to solve it is to help Michael Trausch develop his all-things-to-all-men-and-even-women-and-children mail-cum-news-cum-webforum thingy, and hope it takes over the world.
My advice, obviously, is that I don't think it will work as well as the existing software, but it wouldn't be the first time I've been very wrong, and I hope to live long enough to make many more mistakes. :-) If he's right, it would be a good thing to have, and I think that's the place to look before adding more functionality to the RFC.
Mailman could in theory offer it anyway, but I suspect that without an RFC sanction Barry and Mark would shy away from it.