🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul16.023706.32373@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
|> In article <1992Jul16.005647.10015@mits.mdata.fi> karttu@mits.mdata.fi (Antti Karttunen) writes:
|> >
|> >BTW. Obviously I wasn't thinking 100% when I posted that suggestion.
|> >Of course we don't need no any additional Original-Sender field in header,
|> >because that information is already in From: field. The problem is that
|> >when I reply with R command, and news software takes the mailing list
|> >address from the Reply-To: field into To: field, I have nowhere the
|> >original address of the sender, if he hasn't included it in his signature.
|> 
|>   Complain to the mailing list manager.  Complain to people who write
|> broken software which does this.  The "Reply-To:" is supposed to be
|> an optional header available to the author of the article.  The practice
|> of adding a "Reply-To:" pointing back to the list is abusive.  It abuses
|> the intentions of the "Reply-To:" header.  It abuses the readers who
|> wish to reply privately to the author.  It abuses the readers of the
|> mailing list who see many messages of no interest to anyone but the
|> original author.
|> 

Most lists are set such that any Reply-To inserted by the author will be
respected; the list is only inserted if there is no Reply-To. So, this is
under the poster's control (though how a news gateway behaves regarding
Reply-To is not a function of poster or LISTSERV). Perhaps the gateway should
insert the From: address into Reply-To.

If these Reply-To were so abusive, why have people been using these lists for
so many years? Obviously, people do not feel abused. I don't see your name on
RFC 822, so what makes you so certain of the intentions of Reply-To?

This boils down to the BITNET camp vs. Internet camp again, which is a rather
old debate. Nobody asked Internet users to use LISTSERV...if they don't like
it, they're free to stop using it or write a better product (which nobody has
done). LISTSERV wasn't designed to gateway into news, so it is not LISTSERV's
responsibility to change just so people can use it for this. How a gateway
converts the mail into a news article is the gateway's concern. What headers
the user can access or use for a reply is the user agent's concern.

The big debate on ietf-list-wg, before many of us gave up, realizing that a
consensus was impossible, was whether the new mailing list manager (or
whatever you want to call it) generated a new mail message or simply
distributed the mail message. LISTSERV currently operates by generating a new
mail message, so it is free to put whatever headers it pleases into the
message. I remain in the "new message" camp...otherwise all you would have is
a glorified alias expander and alias list manager. Perhaps this is what some
people want.

The contents of Reply-To are controlled by the poster; the list owner selects
the default. The problem the original poster is having is, I agree, an
undesirable situation; it is not LISTSERV's problem, though. Complaining to
the list owner is a reasonable action; calling LISTSERV "broken" shows an
unjustified arrogance.

--Shane