Sinister: re: wondering

[Honey]

On Wed, 27 Aug 1997, Kate Dornan wrote:

> oooh, a new list :-) so does this mean no more 'missing' posts?!
> Actually, one question; when I pressed the Reply button, my mail program
> automatically put David & Katrina in theTo: field instead of
> sinister at ... , this could get quite annoying if it means remembering to
> substitute the list address every time... are other people getting this?
> Is it because there isn't a reply-to line giving the list address?

I wasn't going to participate much in this just run it..!  Yes, Kate, your
keen eyes have spotted a "feature" - the Reply-To: isn't set and the
default is to reply back to sender.  

The main reason is because it is generally seen as bad practice to do this,
although it's quite widespread - see for instance

	http://www.unicom.com/FAQ/reply-to-harmful.html

The reason for this isn't petty technical completeness but because it can
cause very real problems - only in the last month my mailbox was filled with
900 copies of the same error message caused by a badly constructed mail
program at the receiving end by someone on the list - some of the bigger
corporations just don't abide by standard Internet mailing rules and their
programs send errors back to the Reply-To field, which go back to the list
and via the list back to the offending machine and... you can imagine.  For
people picking up their mail via dial-up I can only imagine the nightmares
this would cause.

Many people see the Reply-To field as a way of forcing something that people
may not want - some people will only *want* to reply to the sender, e.g. can
anyone sell me Tigermilk?" :)

Also some mail programs will ignore the Reply-To anyway.  And others will
see more headers and give a choice...

So I've made the most conservative choice and the safest one, but it does
mean you will have to type the mail address if you want to reply to the
*list*.  Hope this explains why and doesn't lead to a protracted
discussion...

Paul

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