Hi tina, On 7 Apr 2004 at 10:04, tina birenbaum spoke, thus:
> Has anyone else noticed this his I you are replying to a message and sy yes > to the sender only that it still shows up on the list? Warning: some of the text below may induce uncontrollable bouts of dizziness and nausea. >From the technical standpoint, this behaviour is, in fact, the correct one. This list has the Reply-To field set by the Mailman (an excellent list manager - good choice, PDI) daemon to the list address, rather than omitting the field entirely. As RFC2822 explains, the sender of a reply is normally obliged to check the presence of a Reply-To field, and address his/her message to the suggested address. This is not mandatory, though. I don't think, judging from the amount of "I agree" and "Me too" messages appearing on this list and generally that this is a good philosophy to follow, especially with the number of Keymail users here and users of mailers which misread the Reply-To field as the address of a sender on whose behalf Mailman acts. Listmasters - you might like to consider omitting Reply-To in your messages. This setting is not, by default, configurable per user in Mailman. You can either give the user choice, or set the default yourself. If you give the user choice, you can get the best of both worlds - although I don't suppose many people here much know or care about how to manage their subscriptions. For the record, do it online at: http://list.pulsedata.com/mailman/listinfo/braillenote The alternative is to do what many mailers do these days in a desperate attempt to get away from the number of warm and cuddly lists which set the Reply-To header, which is to allow the user to choose whether the From or Reply-To field should be used by default to address a reply. Since the >From field is not corrupted by the list manager, you would address your message to the correct recipient if you chose to send to the address in the From field. I believe, out of principle, that adding a Reply-To field is not a good thing. The two most important reasons for this are: 1. Sending an accidental message to a private member when really you meant the list is easily correctable (or even automatic if the list member in question is nice), which cannot be said for the case when you send a private message to the list when really you only ment to send it to a private member. The added work of addressing to the list, in this respect, is a good preventative measure against serious embarrassments. 2. Modifying mail as it passes through a gateway is time-intensive, more so than simply rewriting the envelope and jamming it back in the queue. Since mailing lists are supposed to distribute whatever mail is given them to all of the list's members, it follows that not modifying it is a good thing anyway. Modding headers thus adds a timeload on the list server. With large lists, VERP does so even more when the headers have been modified, though this is understandably a requirement these days. Cheers, Sabahattin -- Thought for the day: A penny saved is ridiculous. Latest PGP Public key blocks? Send any mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sabahattin Gucukoglu Phone: +44 (0)20 7,502-1615 Mobile: +44 (0)7986 053399 http://www.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/ Email/MSN: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
