[Mailman-Developers] Feature request: Reply-To Munging etc.

[Sven Anderson]

Hi,

as many of you probably would agree, whether you munge the Reply-To headers 
or not, both ways are not perfect. Just today I had a hard time again, as 
I'm not happy with both options, and finally came up with some ideas how the 
situation could be improved, about which I would like to read your comments:

1) Receiver clean-up (if Reply-To munging is NOT used)
One of the problems not using Reply-To munging is, that by using the 
reply-to-all function of MUAs the list of receivers tends to accumulate. As 
in open lists the users cannot know, if an address is part of the list, they 
cannot just delete them without risking to drop people from the discussion. 
So what about an option to clean-up the receivers list in Mailman, that is 
Mailman removes all To/CC addresses which are members of the list?

2) Add non-member-senders to Reply-To (if Reply-To munging IS used)
One of the annoying things using Reply-To munging in open lists is, that you 
cannot easily include external authors in replies, whether you are using 
reply-to or reply-to-all in your MUA. It would be nice, if the sender could 
be added to the Reply-To addresses in the case, that the sender is not a 
member of the list, so that replies automatically go to the list AND the 
author. (Of course, this should be done only, if the sender didn't set his 
own Reply-To header already.)

3) Add sender to Reply-To (if Reply-To munging IS used)
As an variation to the proposal 2) it also would be nice to have the sender 
in general be added to the Reply-To header. That would make replies behave 
similar as the reply-to-all in case of no Reply-To munging. This makes it 
easier to reply only to the author, and not the whole list, by just deleting 
the list address while replying. Because you can also have address 
accumulation in that case, if users use the reply-to-all function, you could 
combine this option with the "receiver clean-up" option from proposal 1).

As proposal 3) doesn't need to know the member status of addresses, you can 
also easily implement it in the MTA, therefore it is the least important one.

What do you think about that? (With some help I can also try to implement 
this on my own, if there are chances to include it into the official Mailman.)


Cheers,

Sven