Re: Reply-to mangling

On Sun, 17 Jul 2005, Alex Holden wrote:

> Also the much talked about "reply to list" mail client feature (which 
> would have allowed you to choose between replying publicly or privately 
> with a single mouse click) hasn't been implemented in the vast majority 
> of mail clients, so working around it by messing with reply-to in the 
> list server is the next best thing.

I think that as the "non-techie" side of the 'net has grown, techie 
features have vanished from most software. As an aside, I've been reading 
mail in Pine for 7 years or so, and reply-to-list is a feature I've never 
found in that software.. and I'd count it among the older techie-oriented 
programs!

> I'm on a lot of mailing lists that have reply-to mangling turned on and 
> it does make it easier to reply to the list instead of to the sender, 
> which is what you want to do most of the time. I do still see people 
> publicly posting messages that they meant to send privately because of 
> the mangling, but I haven't done it myself for years because I've got 
> into the habit of always carefully examining the "To" line before 
> hitting send.

Insertion of the reply-to header does make the common case easy: replying 
to the list. I get automated reminder type messages which show a from: 
address with reply-to somewhere else, but I don't recall ever having seen 
such a message from a Live Person to a mailing list -- so I don't think 
inserting (or mangling the original) reply-to headers will be likely to 
cause any trouble in that regard.

Long story short: I support the motion.

Greg