if you think about it, anytime someone wants to reply to the _author_,
they (or their MUA) should use the From field. it's not reasonable to
assume that the Reply-To field points to the author. it is reasonable
to expect authors to set the From address to a valid address that will
reach them.
This might be, but at least my experience with deployed MUAs suggest
this isn't what is implemented today. MUAs prefer the Reply-To over
From on "reply author". If we want to introduce something new, I
believe it should be designed considering how the majority of MUAs
behave today, even though it may be argued that they are all broken.
there is no solution to these problems that doesn't involve some
changes in MUA behavior. the question is: which changes give the most
benefit for the least transition pain?
it might be that something similar to Usenet's mail-copies-to is less
painful than either reply-to: nobody:; or mail-{followup,reply}-to.
I'm not sure yet. I'd like to look at the proposals side-by-side
first.
Keith