Re: Annoying Reply-To

On Fri, 17 Oct 2008, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> 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.

I should have included the standard links to both sides of this
discussion:

http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
http://www.metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.mhtml

I find the "Principle of Minimal Bandwidth" and "Principle of Least Total
Work" arguments in the latter match my personal preferences here better
(particularly as someone who only cares about on-list replies even more
than the 90% of the time given in that example), while respecting that
true RFC-compliance is also a reasonable perspective.

It's also clear to me you'll never change the mind of anyone who had
adopted a firm stance on either side here. My spirit for e-mail pedantry
arguments was broken recently anyway, when I had someone I'm compelled to
communicate with regularly complain that they couldn't follow my
top-posted messages and requested me to reply "like everybody else" to
their mail in the future.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD