Yes, that is a Good Question. Ideally, the Reply-To-List command should
reply to every list to which the message was sent. The problem is how
does it know this?
To beat Dan's drum for him, in a world that fully implements it,
Mail-Followup-To solves this problem.
Only if authors use MFT only for a very narrow purpose - to distinguish
lists from ordinary addresses. However, it's not the case that everyone
wants to redirect "reply to all" to go to only lists. Nor is it the
case that everyone would want to limit their use of MFT to this purpose.
Treating "reply to MFT" as equivalent to "reply to lists" would overload
MFT almost as badly as Reply-to is currently overloaded.
(there are other problems with using MFT in this way also - one being
that it requires you to configure _all_ of your mail clients to know
about mailing lists. If you're like me you have one at home, one at
work, one on your laptop, one on your PDF, and webmail to use in a pinch.)
That's not in itself an argument against MFT - just an argument against
the notion that MFT provides a reliable "reply to list" feature.
But when you have it set
up, it works well as advertised among people who all use supporting mail
clients (even if the other person hasn't taught their own mail client
about their mailing lists, it works for the first person).
It's easy to define something that works well among a small group of
like-minded people. The challenge is to make something that will work well for
an extremely large and diverse user community. It's unwise to assume
that everyone will want to use a feature in the same way.
I can imagine a smart MUA that would handle this for you by using the
List-* headers.
I can imagine that also. And the first thing I imagine is that it would
have the same problem that Apple's MUA for MacOS X has. It gets its
idea of people's names from random message headers. So if someone
sends me mail with a Cc to "Big Idiot <my(_dot_)friend(_at_)example(_dot_)com>"
then any time after that when I try to type in
"my(_dot_)friend(_at_)example(_dot_)com"
the MUA will automatically fill in "Big Idiot" for me. And so far I
haven't found a way to stop it.
No thank you. I don't want MUAs trying to infer information about
addresses from random messages. (and I don't see how else an MUA
can automatically discover which addresses are associated with lists)
Keith