[sdiy] Reply to sender not list

[Don Tillman]

Folks,

The choice of who one replies to should be the responsiblity of the
user's mail program.  The mail program should have both "reply to
sender" and "reply to all" buttons, and the user should be hitting the
appropriate button, and the buttons should work correctly.

There is this feature called a "Reply-to: header" that can be included
in any mail message.  The purpose is to replace the regular reply
behavior for the case where the original sender really, really wants
any replies to go somewhere else.  An example would be if I were
having a party and I was sending out invitations; I absolutely don't
want the responses to go back to the list.  Likewise if I was
conducting a survey, I might want the responses to go to a special
mailbox that's been set up to parse them.  The reply-to field is only
intended for exceptional cases like those.

Mailing list programs include a reply-to field option because it's
easy to implement and it's useful for anouncement lists.

The original synth-diy list didn't use the reply-to header, this new
list has the reply-to header set to the synth-diy list, and that is
subverting the default mail program operation.

Here's some good reading on the subject:

  "Reply-To" Munging Considered Harmful
  http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

  "Reply-To" Munging Still Considered Harmful. Really.
  http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html

  RFC-822 Standard For the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages
  ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc822.txt

  -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don at till.com
http://www.till.com