[Asterisk-Users] Reply-To?

[Bruno Hertz]

Josiah Bryan <jbryan at productiveconcepts.com> writes:

> On Friday 08 April 2005 1:12 pm, Bruno Hertz wrote:

>> Well, the reason for the latter apparently is that, in some postings to
>> this list, there's actually two entries in the reply-to header, the posters
>> mail and the list address, while in others it's only the list. Why this
>> happens is above me, though, I thought it should be either/or.
>
> Though it may be 'technically' correct per RFC guidlines, is it really correct 
> usage-wise? Commen sense tells me that when I click reply, i want to reply to 
> the message, and i want the message to go back to where it came from, in this 
> case the mailing list, not the individual. The individual sent it to the 
> *Mailing List*, not to *Me*. The *Mailing List* then sent it to me, therefore 
> I am replying to the *Maling List*, not the individual. Does that make sense? 
> Yes, RFCs may say different, but are they really logical to the common man? 
> Or even to technical users who dont care about the RFCs and just want to do 
> their work?


We're about to get knee deep into that age old discussion I guess :)

The point is whether you view the list as a 'sender' or merely as a distribution
channel. If the former, all headers should then be rewritten, From, Cc, whatever.
And that's definitely not what people want.

Now, considering RFC822 and common MUA implementations, current practice is to use
* Reply-To, defaulting to From, for a reply
* Reply-To, defaulting to From, plus To and Cc, for a 'wide reply' or followup.

And here the discussion starts.

One party argues that, since the list address is available in the original To or
Cc, responding to the list should be done by a followup and eleminating unwanted
addresses (i.e. at least the original sender, if Reply-To was untouched by the
mailing list). So there'd be always editing involved, and there's a (high) chance
of people getting two copies of the same mail by accident.

Others say, Reply-To should be rewritten to point to the list, in which a simple
reply would go exactly there. Which means, though, that the original Reply-To,
which might have differed from the 'From', is lost. Not too good either.

Then, people invented the Mail-Followup-To header, which is not standard but
honored by some MUAs these days, to store the list address there, and a followup
or wide reply should honor this header first before defaulting to the above
behavior. But as said this isn't standard and argued about, either. If you
look at my mail headers though, you'll see that one included.

Either way, what I observed in the other mail, i.e. that some mails on this list
have more than one address in the Reply-To header, can afaik definitely be
considered broken behavior and should be fixed. This is most likely a mailman
misconfiguration.

Regards, Bruno.