Vince Sabio pontificated,
| [lots of misguided nonsense in favor of munging Reply-To:, capped by a
| boast about his ability to bias a poll]
I'm withholding my opinions and sticking to facts and experiences here.
| Look, if
| you're not bright enough to pay attention when composing e-mail, you
| really have no business running a mailing list. (And if anyone quotes
| my message from the one time that I did that on one of my lists, I'm
| REALLY gonna get ticked. ;-)
No quoting necessary. Even Mr. Sabio has found default-to-sender less
damaging than default-to-list.
Here are the points I try to make when this comes up:
1. Clobbering Reply-To: destroys any Reply-To: address that the poster
supplied, often making it impossible to send a private response when one
wishes to and the From: address (assuming that From: is preserved) is
the wrong place to send it.
2. Almost every list has some members who insist on one way and some members
who insist on the other.
Because of #2, on my list I offer forced Reply-To: as an option (and because
of my personal stand on the issue, it is not the default). Because of #1,
when people take that option, they get an X-Author-Reply-To: header showing
the reply address of the original post, even if it matches From: (unless the
original submission had a Reply-To: matching or including the list's submis-
sion address, in which case all reflector-mode subscribers get the author's
supplied Reply-To:). Now, I've never seen another list that preserves an
incoming reply address upon munging; they all strip it out.
My list has a sublist where, against my own reluctance, I used to point
replies to the sublist (including X-Author-Reply-To: headers). The results
were disastrous with inappropriate personal replies going every which way.
3. If a submitter to a non-munging list wants replies posted, he or she can
point Reply-To: to the list on his or her own submission. If a submitter
to a list that munges wants private replies or replies to any particular
place other than the list's submission address, he or she can say so in
the body and repeat it and plead until the cows come home, but the article
will still end up in subscribers' mailboxes with Reply-To: aimed squarely
at the list and that's where most of them will send responses.
I guarantee you that if you post to a reply-to-sender list, and you want only
public replies, and you put "Reply-To: listaddress" on your submission, then
the only way you'll get the effect of a group reply is for the respondent to
go to great pains. Otherwise, you'll never see a direct copy of a public
reply to your post.
It is interesting that, for all his distaste for the effects of group re-
plies, Sabio did not point Reply-To: to the list on his own post. That would
have spared him the horror and pain. Though he doesn't deserve anyone else's
effort to take up his slack, I did, and this post is going solely to the
list. So much for his saying that reply-to-sender lists force group replies
with superfluous direct copies. But it's much easier to take addresses out
than to add them. Starting a group reply to a reply-to-sender list allows us
that.
4. When an intended public response on a reply-to-sender list is mistakenly
mailed privately to the preceding author, the respondent can remail it to
the list or ask the preceding author to forward it; at the very worst, the
respondent can retype it. But when an intended private response to a post
on a reply-to-list list is mistakenly sent out to the whole membership,
it cannot be rectified. In fact, its excess bandwidth use is usually
compounded with another post whose sole content is a public apology for
the previous post.
I won't contradict Miles Fidelman's position that some lists are better off
one way and some the other. In my experiences as a list maintainer and as a
list subscriber, I've yet to see any case where munging helped more than it
hurt, but that doesn't mean that the other situation cannot exist.
