Re: [HACKERS] Adding Reply-To: <listname> to Lists configuration ...

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 02:36:10 -0500 Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> The basic issue is that the current setup encourages
> reply-to-author-and-list, while adding Reply-To encourages
> reply-to-list-only (at least when the replier is using one of the mail
> clients I'm used to).

[narrowed to psql-general as i'm not subscribed to hackers...]

there is also a technical list administration consideration. i generally
set up lists [1] to encourage replies to the original author and leave
the rest to the reply author for the simple reason that there used to
be a lot of broken MTAs out there that would spam error bounces
everywhere except to the correct address (anyone remember
MSMail? Lotus CC:Mail was pretty awful too.)

this is not so much a problem now, as most MTAs have at least a
semblance of RFC 821/2821 conformance on error processing, but
i still see the odd busted MTA sending error messages to email addresses
dredged out of wildly inappropriate spots in the message headers.

it's up the list admin, ultimately. if reply-to does get set to the list,
hopefully we'll be lucky and nothing really really bad will happen.

richard

[1] running internet mailing lists since 1985
--
Richard Welty rwelty(at)averillpark(dot)net
Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592
Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security