Date   : Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:10:43 +0000
From   : afra@... (Phill Harvey-Smith)
Subject: Who the message is from...

Kevin Bracey wrote:
> Rick Murray wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I know this has been gone over before - although I am wondering if there 
>> is any *technical* reason why the "From" attribution in this mailing 
>> list is not the mailing list itself?

None at all.

> Hello folks,
> 
> I've just joined the list today, 

Welcome to the BBC mailing list :)

>                           and it looks perfectly configured to 
> me. So admins - please don't mess with it!

Odd you're the first person round here that has said that in the 12 
months or so that I have been on the list.

> * The From and Reply-To fields are the real ones from the person sending 
> the list, as they should be.
> * There's a List-Id header which lets you filter accurately.
> * And there's a List-Post header which tells a good list-aware e-mail 
> client where to send replies to the list.
> 
> This sort of thing comes up periodically on mailing lists from people 
> who are having troubles with their e-mail client, but all the 
> alternatives to this correct configuration are worse. Your suggestion, 
> in particular, would make it hard to send private replies, and probably 
> cause embarrassing cock-ups.

Except that in my experience the majority of mailing lists are 
configured to send replies by default back to the list, so people expect 
this to be the default behavior.

And as we have seen people are constantly apologising because their 
replies don't go to the list when they are meant to, indicates to me 
that perhaps the list is not configured how people would expect it to be.

After all the idea of a mailing list is to make communication easier, 
from the number of moans we have had on here in the about 12 months I 
have been a member I wonder if it is achieving that, as well as it could.

But hell this list isn't a democracy, it's a dictatorship so get used to it.

Personally I have configured my mailserver to insert a reply-to to send 
messages back to the list, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

> A good e-mail client like Messenger Pro will present a mailing list 
> pretty much exactly as a Usenet newsgroup, and it functions like one. 

Humm except that if you send a reply on usenet, the reply, unless you 
specifically reply by email goes to the whole group by *DEFAULT*.

> But that relies on the list not mucking around with From and Reply-To 
> headers. Thunderbird, which I'm currently using, isn't that good, but 
> works adequately filtering on List-Id and using Reply-to-all.
> 
> Here's a web page on the topic of mailing list configuration:
> 
> http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html

And that's just one point of view, and what makes this person any more 
qualified to hold fourth on this subject than any of us. Really this 
comes across as saying "the configuration of the list is correct cause 
this guy says so ok".

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.