Dragaera

Straw Poll about "Reply-to" (was: Damiano's Lute)

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Sat Nov 30 21:11:09 PST 2002

On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Joshua Kronengold wrote:

#Mind, I've got some nifty custom e-lisp code that makes these "do the
#right thing" even for known lists that use reply-tos (ie, r ignores
#the reply-to header on such lists, while "f" obeys it, thus taking
#advantage of this "feature").  And I do think that it would be a Good
#Thing if there were a standard people could code email clients/lists
#to that would allow for this behavior without munging standard
#headers.

#Agreed -- it's much worse to accidentally send a private message
#instead of a public one than to accidentally send a public one instead
#of a private one.

Unless that accidentally-"published" message has personal, confidential,
or embarrassing contents. (You can tell I'm saying this from my devotion
to truth rather than from partisan purpose because I favor making
"reply-to-all" the default on discussion lists, including this one.)

#But what are 'yall using the "reply" (rather than "reply to all")
#thing on -any- list?  "reply to all" does the right thing on both this
#kind of list and on "reply-to" lists.

Well, for some of us it's not equally easy. Pine has R for reply, and
then it asks you "reply to all?" Or maybe it first asks you "include
original message?" and then "reply to all?" If you're in a hurry...

#Certainly not.  Instead, the bad behavior of other lists has caused me
#to spend some time learning lisp code and having to code around them
#to make them Do the Right Thing.

Ah, then the nifty facilitating workaround you mention above is
definitely Not Available to some of us. Most of us?

-- Mark A. Mandel (Hi, Joshua!)