🚀 go-pugleaf

> FROM: Ole Jorgen Jacobsen <OLE@SRI-NIC.ARPA>
>
> Jakob,
>     I'll have to totally disagree with you on this, Scandinavian
> loyalty or not. The issue of who your reply goes to is a matter of
> taste and choice depending on the circumstances. I believe it SHOULD
> NOT be made part of any protocol, but SHOULD be an option in your
> local User Agent. When I started to reply to your message a couple of
> minutes ago, my user agent (MM) very cleverly asked me if I wanted to
> reply to "sender only" or "all". I think this (thanks to Mark
> Crispin!) is exactly the right thing to do. Why add new fields to RFC
> 822 when you can have smarter user agents?
>
>     I assure you that I am not the only person who has been burnt
> by the "reply" function over the last ten years or so. Sometimes you
> want your reply to go to "all", while other times you definitely don't.
> The trouble is that so many user agents decide what "The Right Thing"
> is for you and don't give you the option.

Was this a statement of disagreement with anything I wrote?

But I agree completely with you that decisions on where to send a
reply should be up to the writer of the reply, aided by his user
agent. Since two common alternatives is to send a reply to either
only the originator, or to all recipients of the commented
message, so many systems provide simple commands for those two
alternatives which is very good.

You are questioning whether the mail protocols should contain any
support for this at all. However, there may be cases where the sender
or the system of the sender wishes to indicate that replies should
be redirected. Examples:

(1) Replies to the sender only may be redirected to the secretary
of the sender, some special folder for collecting replies to a
certain question etc.

(2) Replies to all may be redirected to avoid duplicates (do not
send me a personal copy, I will get it via the list) or because
some CC recipient with only marginal interest does not want to get
all the replies.

Since there are completely different needs for redirection in
case of replies to the originator and replies to the whole group,
there is a need for two different kinds of "Reply-to" header fields,
one for each kind of reply.

It is of course always up to the writer of the reply and his
UA to decide to which extent they want to heed the advice in
the reply-to fields. No one should be forced to send a reply
to any particular address.