Re: Understanding response protocols

In <[email protected]> Paul Jakma <[email protected]> writes:

>On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Charles Lindsey wrote:

>> It would be better if there were a couple of keywords so you could say
>>
>>    Mail-Followup-To: poster,list
>>
>> and configure that for all lists you subscribe to.

>To be honest, I'd rather see some kind of 'best-practice for 
>Reply-To' document than MFT. Reply-To, in an ideal world, should work 
>just as well. The only reason for MFT, it seems, is just to avoid 
>bogus behaviour in MTAs wrt Reply-To.

No! Reply-To is what you should use if you want to send a personal reply
to the author of, the original message (which indeed you sometimes need to
do if, for example, your reply is too complex/personal/whatever for
sending to thje complete list).

Therefore, it is evident that some further Reply-to-like header (MFT, MCT
or something new) is needed for use with the "Reply-to-List" command (or
Reply-to-All if Reply-to-list is not provided).

Such a header should be flexible enough to include/not-include the
original poster (or his nominee) in the reply, and to include/not-include
various sub-lists/super-lists/parallel-lists/no-list-at-all in the reply.


>> Actually, that is all beginning to look quite like the 
>> Mail-Copies-To header sometimes used in News.

>Right.

>But it doesn't offer much extra though. (except that it avoids 
>current bad Reply-To behaviour in some MUAs). If we were to have a 
>new header like that i'd want it:

>1. transitive (must be kept in replies)

>2. additive (so people could add their own/further mailboxes to it,
>    if they wanted)

>3. Get rid of that ambigious 'never' thing it allows

The main problem is that it currently allows only one option to be
specified:  poster, nobody (aka never) and some mailbox-list.

"poster" means poster+list/newsgroup.
"nobody" means list/newsgroup only.
mailbox-list means addresses-listed+list/newsgroup.

If you want reply not to go to the list/newsgroup at all, then you have to
use Followup-to: poster (which then uses the Reply-To address).

So that isn't quite what we want.

So the question is whether it is easier to add the functionality we want
to MFT or to MCT, or whether to start over.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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