[Mailman-Developers] Re: Reply-To munging & member_aliases

[Joseph Knapka]

Tom Neff <tneff at bigfoot.com> writes:

>   Reality check:  Most mailers today already theoretically give users some
> kind of option over where a reply goes.  The problems arise because in the
> real world, users pay no attention to that stuff.  They barely know how to
> hit Send.
> 
>   So what in the world would delude us into thinking that if we introduced
> some kind of per-member Reply-To: option, these people would know or bother
> to use it?  They'll never touch it!  The only people who will change it are
> the people who are already savvy enough to direct their replies correctly
> without it.
> 
>   Also, on lists of the COMET-ANNOUNCE-L variety, where the admin has
> specifically set a reply policy or reply address, it seems positively harmful
> to allow individual members to override it.
> 
>   I do not see the usefulness of this per-member patch.

The usefulness of a subscriber reply-to option is that it should
reduce the bandwidth devoted to reply-to munging dramatically. Rather
than each "let's change reply-to" post turing into a
several-hundred-post thread, as they always seem to, those threads
would be squashed by a single reply: "If you don't like it the way it
is, go to this URL and change it."

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka