[Mailman-Users] Re: Reverting question

Tanner Lovelace lovelace at wayfarer.org
Wed Nov 15 05:42:53 CET 2000


Marc MERLIN wrote:
> 
> The irony of this coming back over and over again...
> http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

One good URL deserves another (straight from the
"reply_goes_to_list Option" documentation):

http://www.metasystema.org/essays/reply-to-useful.mhtml

There are arguments on both sides for this issue.  I 
personally think it depends a lot on what the people
on your list prefer.  I run a large non-technical
mailing list where we tried making the "Reply-To" 
point to the list for a while.  Unfortunately, it
resulted in someone accidentally posting a very
unflattering message about someone else on the list.
Since, this is a non-technical list (actually it's
about as non-technical as you can get since it's
a list for medieval recreationist list), I can't
assume that people will automatically understand
the ramifications of the "Reply-To" header so I
decided that for my list it would be better to
have the "Reply-To" not point to the list.  For other
lists, however, I think it could be advantageous.
Because of that, I think that letting the list
administrator decide, rather than the software,
is the best method.

I also think, though, that sometimes setting
the "Reply-To" and sometimes not, depending on
whether or not it has already been set has the
potential to confuse a lot of people.  If you're
going to provide *that* functionality, you should
make sure it is *extremely* well documented.

Tanner Lovelace
P.S. I'm kind of curious as to how many people
use Mailman with qmail.  Are there any statistics
on this?  I haven't been able to find any.
-- 
Tanner Lovelace
lovelace at wayfarer.org
http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
Cthulu for President.  Why settle for the lesser evil?




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