[Mailman-Developers] Reply-To munging considered *carefully*

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

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.