Simon Josefsson <jas(_at_)extundo(_dot_)com> schrieb/wrote:
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".
Well, the "reply author" function is IMO just mislabelled. It actually
means: "reply to a small number of persons".
Or to put it another way: MUAs really need a "reply author" button,
but they don't have one. The typical "reply" button doesn't
quite work like it should because the "narrow reply" really doesn't
map to what the recipient is likely to want to do.
(The only time I ever use (narrow) "reply" is when I really want
"reply to author". And then I have to check the From field of the
resulting message to see if the author had specified reply-to .
If he did I often have to edit the field and restore the correct
address.)
Keith Moore's proposal caters for the same problem (replies don't go
where they are supposed to go) and it's more compatible with existing
MUAs that don't understand the header. But it's more complex to under-
stand for the average user and it's not compatible with the mental model
users have made based on the common user agent UIs.
Actually I think it's the other way around. Setting mail-reply-to
and mail-followup-to headers is more complex for the average user,
since it requires the user to specify exactly which recipients should
get replies in each of two cases. It's much easier for the user to
say "please don't copy these recipients on replies".
Ideally of course, the author's user agent would provide the user
with a good interface that lets the author enable or disable
reply-ability on a per-address basis. Then it would map those
requests to whatever header fields were appropriate.
And it still does
not provide a distinction between different types of replies, which is
what user agent desingers want to provide.
User agents should definitely provide different kinds of replies. But
I don't think it's useful to allow the author of a message to fundamentally
change the behavior of those kinds of replies.
Keith