Date   : Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:20:57 -0600
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Mailing list headers

Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> What is the "reply to /all/ recipients" supposed to do?

It includes both the 'sender' field, 'from' field (and anyone on the 'cc' list 
I believe). At least with Thunderbird though the 'from' field takes priority 
and appears in the 'to' field on a reply, with everything else going in 'cc' - 
which means the fields need changing before sending to the list.

> email client receives "From: fred", "Reply-to: jim". What does
> reply to /all/ do? Reply to /both/ the from and the reply-to?

The classiccmp list has both 'from' and 'reply-to' fields. Both 'reply' and 
'reply-all' result in a single 'to' field containing the mailing list address 
- i.e. they seem to act on the 'reply-to' address only.

There's no direct way of sending to an individual other than cutting and 
pasting the 'from' field data. That's no big deal as people tend to want to do 
that only a tiny fraction of the time; the vast majority of messages (as with 
other lists) "want" to go to the list as a whole anyway.

>> You no longer have a button to just reply to the originator
>> of the message, so you've lost useful functionality.
>  
> "reply to author"...?

See above. But I don't think that's a big deal as people on mailing lists 
typically *don't* want to do that anyway. I'd rather that than have to do some 
cut / paste / delete / insert crap on every single message to a list.