Hi,
On Tue, 2020-07-07 at 21:34 +0200, Sander Striker wrote:
> 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.
Precisely this.
A conscious decision to post on-list cannot be damaging when you forget
to post to the list, while a conscious decision to reply privately can
be damaging when forgetting to explicitly reply privately.
> 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.
While I certainly don't agree with it, it would appear that the ASF has
already taken a project-wide position on this, which is probably not
worthwhile rehashing.
Cheers,
-Tristan
