Simon Josefsson <jas(_at_)extundo(_dot_)com> writes:
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
That's not in itself an argument against MFT - just an argument against
the notion that MFT provides a reliable "reply to list" feature.
Right. Thinking of MFT as a "reply to list" feature is misleading.
Valid point. I apologize for the introduced confusion.
MFT is the "reply to list" feature that I actually *want* -- I can't
imagine a circumstance in which I'd want the version of "reply to list"
that excludes users who explicitly want copies of the thread. For that
exceptionally rare situation, I'd delete those addresses manually. But
you're correct that it's not quite a "reply to list" as Charles was
describing it.
If MFT help some people, and (of course) do not harm others, it is
useful. I haven't seen any arguments that MFT is harmful, only that it
might not be useful enough or that it has bad legacy behavior. Which
are much weaker arguments.
Yeah, exactly.
Populating MFT automatically based on what is gleaned from List-Post is
just a bad idea though.
Please note that having a smart MUA figure this out for you doesn't mean
it needs to be on full automatic. Gnus already has some support for doing
this sort of thing at the prompting of the user.
Ideally, MUAs should know how to subscribe to mailing lists for you so
that they can track your subscription, keep track of changes to the
submission address (as long as List-Id doesn't change), keep track of how
to unsubscribe (from List-* headers) so that you can do so at the click of
a button, and in the process keep MFT working for you if you want. I've
not seen one that does this yet, but I can easily imagine a way of doing
it that would still be entirely under my control.
But then, I use Gnus, and am not the average mail user. Most people seem
to limp along with something like Outlook without any filtering, folders,
or any of the features without which my mail would be unreadable. So this
may just baffle them completely.
On the gripping hand, users who don't know how to use e-mail usually
aren't on the sheer quantity of mailing lists that make these sorts of
things useful, don't deal with the edge cases that annoy the rest of us,
and are usually fairly happy with Reply-To set to the list (in my
experience running mailing lists for the last ten years).
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>