Reply-To: header

[Urban Widmark]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Mike Fedyk wrote:

> Who wants to vote for a reply-to: header pointing back to the samba list?

No, please don't (well vote-away, but listadmin, please don't add this).

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

It is very useful to reply both to the list and the original author, it
allows for faster message exchange between 2 people since it doesn't have
to be queued up on the samba.org mailserver. I would have to fix my mailer
to have an "ignore reply-to:" command, not very nice.

Granted, a lot of people on this list only replies in private and too many
problems are resolved off-list when they should be on-list (and end up in
some archive for future reference). A reply-to header would force them on
the list. But that would fall under "Freedom of Choice".


> I end up pressing reply to all for most of my replies and have two messages come
> to me, one through bcc and one through the list.  I'm wondering if there are
> more people that would like the header too.  Anyone?

Sounds like your local mail setup has a problem filtering messages,
install a better filter.


The reply and the cc both have the same Message-ID header (unless some
broken mailserver software decides to rewrite everything you pass through
it) so you can setup a procmail/formail rule to filter out duplicates,
other filters probably have similar possibilities.

.procmailrc:

:0 Wh: msgid.lock
| /usr/bin/formail -D 8192 .msgid.cache

(ok, I admit I didn't write this myself, I copied it from somewhere and
 maybe it doesn't do what I think it does ... :)


The other common suggestion is to add a tag to the subject with the list
name to make it easier to filter messages. For the record I believe that
is equally wrong, there are already lots of good headers to filter on.
(I know you didn't suggest this, but I am grouping the "reply-to" people
 with the "subject-filtering" people ... sorry :)

/Urban