On Oct 14, 2009, at 1:35 AM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
There are two major uses of email, discounting automatically generated messages, corporate crap and spam: email from one person or to oneperson or a group of people, and email from one person to a mailing list(presumably with people on it).
You need to at the coarsest break down the latter into sub- categories. Mailing lists can be discussion lists like this one, or "announce" (one-way) lists. Often, those latter lists want to funnel further discussion to a second mailing list. I don't see how selective Reply-To munging can support this use case.
However, the primary use-case for a mailing list is _group_ _discussion_. Or at least, so I thought. Call me silly, but if it's not meant to be group discussion as the primary role, maybe mailing lists should stop using server software and become ad-hoc, old boys'club style, personally shared and replicated distribution lists, nothingmore. Being that is the case, and that is what users of mailing lists _expect_, it is reasonable to assume that the way reply-to is handled would be thus:
Hyperbole aside, I don't believe this corresponds to what users expect. People need to know intuitively and consistently what their MUA buttons are going to do and will not hunt around in composition fields to try to figure that out.
Mail.app for example has a Reply button and a Reply All button. I think the most intuitive interpretation of those is that the former replies to the author and the latter replies to all recipients (one of which happens to be the mailing list). Breaking that contract will piss people off and cause potentially serious damage, and doing so unpredictably will make matters worse.
* I send an email to the mailing list to start a thread of discussion. I send no reply-to header on the message, so the list processingsoftware appends one redirecting replies to the group. This facilitatesgroup discussion. It's not Orwellian, it's common sense---if, of course, we make the assumption that mailing lists are for, you know, group discussion and not private communication.
It also breaks your MUA.
If I want to communicate privately with someone, I won't be sending the mail to a mailing list; if I need to communicate with someone who is on a ML privately, and I don't have their address, that's what ML archives are for (or, sending a mail to the ML to ping them, or searching my own archives, if the public archives have that information stripped).
Have you never wanted to reply privately to the author of a mailing message?
I do all the time, and even though I trust my MUA and most mailing lists to be configured properly, I'm extremely anal about checking my headers (and sometimes after the fact, even checking my Sent folder ;). But I confidently state that this is aberrant behavior :) Most normal people will just trust their buttons and hit send. The damage this can cause is irreversible.
* During the course of the thread, it becomes clear that some sensitiveinformation must be sent (to address your use case from your Web pagefrom earlier in this thread). That's totally not a problem: The personasking for the sensitive information simply adds a reply-to header to their outbound message.
The problem with this analysis is that it's not the original sender that gets to decide whether responses will contain sensitive information or not, it's the person sending the reply.
Citation, please? I already quoted the part of RFC 2822 that shows thatsemantically speaking your assertion is incorrect. If there is an RFC that supersedes the definitions of RFC 2822, I'd like to see it. At present, I am not aware of one. (Further, if there is additional clarification that I've missed in my readings of RFC 2822, I'd like a pointer to that, as well; I've already read it once today, maybe I'll review it again later for things I missed in today's reading.)
Here's what RFC 5322 $3.6.2 says:"The originator fields also provide the information required when replying to a message. When the "Reply-To:" field is present, it indicates the address(es) to which the author of the message suggests that replies be sent. In the absence of the "Reply-To:" field, replies SHOULD by default be sent to the mailbox(es) specified in the "From:" field unless otherwise specified by the person composing the reply."
There's no way that I can read that to suggest that the mailing list has any right to touch that field. This language says to me that Reply-To is firmly under the purview of the message's original author.
In my (admittedly, limited in terms of global and topical coverage) personal experience, _most_ mailing lists are poorly configured on the extreme of users not being able to specify a reply-to at all, because the reply-to is stripped and subsequently replaced by the mailing list software. Clearly, this is _bad_. Is it wrong? Not according to RFC 2822, because the mailing list processor is the logical origin of a message and thus it is clear to send the header---or not---as it sees fit.
I completely disagree. The MLM is not the "logical origin" of a message.
However, what sparked this thread was a practical concernregarding a very common usage pattern, not a concern that everything be 100% idealistic and precisely fit some standard as interpreted by randomperson X. In other words, what we're talking about is left---according to theambiguous text in RFC 2822---as an implementation detail of mailing listprocessing software.
Again, I disagree with this interpretation. -Barry
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