Re: Header fields and followup address

* Ben Finney:

> Florian Weimer <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> PS: What's wrong with using a Mail-Followup-To: header?
>
> (That's “header field”. Remember, folks: an email message has, as
> specified in RFC 2822, exactly *one* header, consisting of multiple
> fields.)

Oh, this belongs to -curiosa because 1) RFC 822 actually uses
"headers" as a shorthand for "header fields", 2) the construction
field name + "header" and the phrase "RFC 822 header" referring to a
header field are used in several RFCs (1327, 1505, 2156, 2298, 2919,
3282, 3297, 3458, just to name a few), so it can hardly be considered
ungrammatical as far as the English language is concerned,

> I can see two reasons:
>
> It's non-standard. It is not one of the standard header fields, so its
> name should start with ‘X-’, and its implementation is user-defined in
> the absense of a standard.

and 3) RFC 2822 abolished X- extension headers.

Oops.

> The poorly-written document proposing it
> <URL:http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/98dec/I-D/draft-ietf-drums-mail-followup-to-00.txt>
> failed to pass, and expired in 1998, so it's unlikely it will ever
> *be* standard.

Your message contains several other non-standard headers.  The Debian
list software adds several more.

> It's essentially obsolete, at least for the purpose of mailing lists,
> since RFC 2369 fields that allow the “reply to list” function are
> deployed in essentially every mailing list manager. Let's agitate to
> fix the “reply to list” functionality where we find it lacking (I'm
> looking at you, Thunderbird) before we agitate for non-standard field
> implementations.

The RFC 2369 headers don't work with cross-posting.  Mail-Followup-To
does.