Date   : Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:34:40 +0000
From   : adsb@... (Andrew Benham)
Subject: Mailing list headers

I'm happy with the way the list is setup currently.


Pretend for a moment that this message has not been sent via
a mailing list, but is a message sent personally by me with
212 individual recipients.

On your email client, you would hit the "reply to sender"
button to send a reply to just me, and the "reply to all
recipients" button to send a reply to everyone.

This message has been sent via a mailing list, and you treat
it the same as above - "reply to sender" to reply to only
the sender, and "reply to all recipients" to, well, reply
to all recipients ('the list').



If the list was configured with a "Reply-To:" header with
the list's address, then you would use "reply to sender"
to reply to all recipients, and "reply to all recipients"
to, oh dear, reply to all recipients.
You no longer have a button to just reply to the originator
of the message, so you've lost useful functionality.

And if you put the list's address in a "Reply-To:" header,
what do you do if the original message had its own "Reply-To:"
header ?  Discard that 'Reply-To', so now you really can't
reply to the originator on the address she's requested you
to use ?  Or put both the list address and the original
'Reply-To' address into one new 'Reply-To' header (assuming
that the list software lets you do this) ?

As others have quoted, see:
    http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
although I wish it referred to more modern email clients
than Elm.

-- 
Andrew Benham           adsb@...       
Southgate, London N14, United Kingdom

The gates in my computer are AND OR and NOT, not "Bill".