Re: Annoying Reply-To

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 09:27:46AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:

> Mikkel is right, every other well-organized mailing list I've ever been on
> handles things the sensible way he suggests, but everybody on his side

They may be well-organized, but they're doing bad things to the mail
headers. RFC 5322 (which just obsoleted 2822) says this:

When the "Reply-To:" field is present, it
indicates the address(es) to which the author of the message suggests
that replies be sent.

The mailing list is not the author of the message. Therefore it
should not alter that header.

Moreover, since you are allowed at most one Reply-To header, if the
original author needs individual responses to go to some other
address, then that Reply-To: header will be lost if the list munges
them.

There is therefore a mail standards reason not to munge the headers,
and it rests in the rules about origin fields and in the potential for
lost functionality. Given the project's goal of SQL conformance, why
would we blow off SMTP standards?

(Anyway, I agree with Tom, so I'm saying nothing more in this thread.)

A

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