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"MH" == Mark Hammond writes:

MH> [I wishing mailing-lists would agree on how they handle MH> reply-to :-] It's fundamentally broken, but the problem is in the mail readers (MUA). There's no header (that I'm aware of) that portably tells an MUA - "Hey, for a group follow up, don't go to the original list, go to THIS one instead, but for an individual followup (i.e. reply) still address that to the original author." This is one reason why munging reply-to is evil. But in this case we've agreed that following up to python-dev is more important than preserving the ability to reply to the author. -Barry

Greg Stein :

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This is one reason why munging reply-to is evil. But in this case we've agreed that following up to python-dev is more important than preserving the ability to reply to the author.

What about the Mail-Followup-To header? That can be helpful for some newsreaders (e.g. Mutt). Dunno how many observe it.

Eudora honors it, too. It's not an official standard, unfortunately; I was on the IETF committee where that battle was fought to a bloody draw. But it's the best you can do. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a> "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188

At 12:16 PM -0400 7/1/00, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

GS> What about the Mail-Followup-To header? That can be helpful GS> for some newsreaders (e.g. Mutt). Dunno how many observe it.

It looks like VM/Emacs doesn't (which is what I use), but I'm sure that'd be easy to add. I would be most interested to know what Outlook and NS do with it.

However Mail-Followup-To: isn't in any RFC that I can find, not even 2076.

It's non-standard, and in fact, arguably non-compliant, since any unofficial header should be in the X-headername form.

So there is clearly no header that will support the functionality we want.

This is a case where Reply-To is the correct header to set, or at least, least incorrect.

One potential solution for Mailman might be to lie about the To: address. So in the above scenario, the message would have a To: field set to python-dev even though the message would actually be sent to the python-checkins membership.

um, uh, well... I don't like it. Even if you had Sender: and List-ID set properly, it still seems wrong. For this case, I think the best setup is Reply-to, because that's waht you want: it came FROM this place, but responses go to this other place. The proper answer is setting reply-to, not attempting to rearrange the concept of "from this place". As a strong proponent of "don't use reply-to!" -- this is a case where it's the proper answer. It's not perfect by any means, since reply-to coerces someone away from replying privately, but in this situation, that's better than not doing it. -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"