Hi all, here's finally my next proposal for a less broken but yet very useful reply-to-munging:
- Motivation Non-technical users (generally) love defaults. They don't wanna have to choose between three different kind of reply buttons. And no-way they want to change their MUA they just got painfully used to (or even their mail address, as most of them are using webmail providers), just because of a stupid mailing list. So there's a user base who are mostly using webmailers and Outlook, and who just want to press "Reply" as they usually do, no matter if there is even a "Reply-To-All" button right next to it. Although this is a big pain for us geeks, I think a great software like Mailman should offer options (not default behavior) to serve such a user base. That's why I think, that Mailman should offer an option to set the default behavior of the standard reply button. The question what the default behavior of the reply button should be has to be discussed in each lists user base, Mailman should offer the choice. Many list admins are very thankful, if they don't have to educate their users. - Proposed solution There is no RFC-way to set the default address for replies. The Reply-To header _replaces_ the From address in replies, which is something else than setting a default. That's why setting the Reply-To completely hides the From address (regarding replies) and therefore abusing it as a default breaks the reply-to-all function for instance, as it doesn't include the From address neither (which is correct, as long as the Reply-To address is an _replacement_ for the From address). Since there is no other way but to abuse the Reply-To header to control the default reply behavior, reply-to-munging has to take care of the From address too. There are four possible default reply targets that I consider as useful and should be offered at least as a list-wide option. (If individual mails are sent out, like with VERP, a per-user option is the best of course.) 1. Author 2. List 3. All recipients and author 4. Explicit address And this is, what I propose that Mailman should do in these cases: ad 1) Author is the "default default target" ;-). So no munging needed at all, no problems. ad 2) If Reply-To is already set, it is removed. Reply-To is set to the lists address. The old Reply-To or - if not existing - the From address is checked if it is a list member. If not, it is added as a "fake Cc" to the Cc header, in order to make the reply-to-all function work. ad 3) If Reply-To is already set, it is removed. Reply-To is set to: - the lists address, - all addresses in To/Cc headers, that are no list members, and - the old Reply-To or - if not existing - the From address, if not a list member ad 4) If Reply-To is already set, it is removed. Reply-To is set to the explicit address. The old Reply-To or - if not existing - the From address is checked if it is a list member. If not, it is added as a "fake Cc" to the Cc header, in order to make the reply-to-all function work. Of course, with option 2-4 you still lose the reply-to-author function, but at least for 2 and 4 in exchange for a new function, which a standard MUA with just a reply and reply-to-all button doesn't offer. Example: Me and two colleagues are the management board of a local radio station. We use Mailman as a "Deluxe-Alias" for both communication among us and as Alias for people who want to contact us. So a lot of mails on this list come from non-members. In these cases I either want to answer only to the list (my colleagues) or to the author and the list, but _never_ to the author alone. So it's obvious that in this case we would like to have the reply button going to the list, and reply-to-all going to all (including the author, what at the moment doesn't work). We want the default going to the list, not only because of our MUAs (Thunderbird, Mutt, Webmailer) only Mutt supports reply-to-list, but also because we want the default reply to be the least dangerous, which in our case is the list. Funnily enough, the mutt user wants the most, that the normal reply is going to the list. ;-) I hope I could make clear my ideas and point of view. Cheers, Sven _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
