I am writing a mailing-list manager and am trying to figure out how to set
the headers so that:
- the client's reply command causes mail to go to the original sender
- the client's reply-all command causes mail to go to the original sender
and the list
I like Dan Bernstein's suggestions re Mail-Follow-Up and Mail-Reply-To
(http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html) but don't know if they're actually
supported by MUAs.
What I'm currently doing is using the original sender as reply-to, the list
name as cc, and the recipients as bcc. To prevent infinite regress, the
list manager ignores messages sent by itself. This worked fine when I sent
the same message to all subscribers. For n subscribers, I would send 1
message with n+1 recipients.
The problem is I'm switching to using VERPs
(http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt), which require a distinct message for each
subscriber. This would require me to send n messages, each with 2
recipients (the real recipient and the list (so reply-all works)). This
would cause me to send n wasteful list->list messages, which I would rather
avoid.
How do other people handle this?
Ellen
P.S. FYI, the mailing list manager I'm writing (javamlm) is based on ezmlm
but provides greater per-user customization and easier programmer
extensibility. With its greater power but lesser scalability, it's aimed
at communities of thousands (not millions) of users.
