Hi Tristan, On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 11:26 AM Tristan Van Berkom < [email protected]> wrote:
> Dear mailing list admins, > > I've noticed a strange behavior while replying to emails on this new > list, as if the list is trying to control to whom I send the replies, > and upon inspection, I have verified that this list is indeed munging > the reply-to headers. > > As this has been well known to be harmful for decades[0], I would ask, > can we please disable this reply-to munging on our mailing list ? > Obviously this has been a debate back when... The oldest instance I could find is from 1995(!) [1]. In the context of the ASF, where "If it didn't happen on-list, it didn't happen" (e.g. [2][3], the reply-to to the list can actually be seen as a feature, not a bug. It makes it a conscious decision to not publicly reply. I've inquired with the Infrastructure team and it turns out that most (read: near all) of the lists have reply-to set to the list. With the exception of commits@ lists, which typically have reply-to set to the dev@ list. I remember from my early days in the ASF (2004) that we also had a short conversation about Reply-To [4]. The expectation seemed to be that replies went to the list. And annoyance was voiced more regarding inconsistency than anything else. The result was the inconsistency being fixed. Now, as you mention mail clients, it appears that the client I'm using at the moment (Gmail) will use the original sender when "Reply"-ing, and will use all To/Cc when "Reply All"-ing. Also, a little birdie told me that Thunderbird also has this behavior with an additional "Reply List" function. Given the above, I'm inclined to just leave it as-is. But obviously we could discuss further if need be. Cheers, Sander [1] https://lists.apache.org/api/source.lua/431494706a6404b853e046f412d2f5a6351f9375300904c7d2415712@816231838@%3Cdev.httpd.apache.org%3E [2] https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache-in-2017-by-the [3] https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/celebrating_17_years_of_the [4] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/1cc9bd09c220d3b62078e2f9fcefebd205fe79c0a3aee1e20ad25a95%401095938449%40%3Cdev.httpd.apache.org%3E Especially for the sake of following the principles of least surprise > and the least damage, as specified in the (very old) referred article, > the inconvenience of occasionally receiving multiple copies of the same > email (one to you, and one to the list, and only when using "reply all" > instead of "reply to list" which some modern mail clients also now > support), is a very small price to pay. > > Best regards, > -Tristan > > [0]: https://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html > > >
