Re: Understanding response protocols

In <[email protected]> Keith Moore <[email protected]> writes:

>- Even when people hit the right button, (i.e. "reply to author" or
>  "reply all") the behavior of an MUA in the presence of reply-to or
>  other header fields is often surprising to the user, because these
>  fields are either difficult to notice or not displayed at all.

In every mail agent I have used, the compose window starts out showing
editable fields for To: and Cc:. So if you don't like what it offers
initially, you just change it. I grant you that any agent that fails to
provide that is severely broken, but what agents are that bad?

[And, to confuse the issue, I discovered yesterday that Outlook provides
such a field entitled "From", but what you type in there actually turns
into the Reply-To header of the sent message, and the From header contains
what should have been in the Sender. Doh!]


>Just in case it isn't clear, I have no objection to defining a new header field
>which is set by lists (and only by lists), and which says in effect, "if you 
>want to reply to the list, use this address."  However, without substantial
>changes to the UIs of MUAs, such a field won't be terribly useful, and may
>even be harmful if it produces less consistent behavior than at present.

We need:
1. A header to be set by the list maintainer.
2. A header to be set by the user, to control where replies to list go
(and in particular whether he gets a private copy or not).
3. A header to be set by the user to control where personal (non-list)
replies go.

And rules to determins which takes priority if they conflict.

I think it is clear that Reply-To is the proper header for #3. Whether
you actually need separate headers for #1 and #2 is a topic for dicussion.

>Note that such a field is NOT the same as Mail-Followup-To, which was 
>intended to be set by message originators.  Trying to equate the two 
>doesn't lend credibility to your arguments.

I believe the current intention for MFT is to cover both #1 and #2. That
certainly is my reading of Jacob Palme's draft.

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Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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