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Re: [Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-moore-mail-nr-fields-00.txt]

2004-09-04 17:20:10

It sounds like you're making the assumption that there are two types of reply (individual and to-all), and Reply-To should be used to send them to the appropriate location with the only difference being whether people in
the To and Cc headers are included.

No, the assumption I'm making is that the message author(s) know(s) where he wants plain replies (as opposed to reply-to-all) to go and is capable of setting Reply-To accordingly.

Perhaps, but that's nearly useless, as there's no way to encourage users to use "plain reply".

As it's implemented today, Reply-to is little more than a surrogate From. Actually, we would probably be better off without it - because adding reply-to to a message results in less predictable behavior on the part of the recipient.

Now it happens to be the case that most MUAs have two types of reply functions corresponding to the two cases.

Both of which do the wrong thing. "plain reply" should probably be (and be labeled) "reply to author". The other "reply" (call it "group reply") should probably have some way of excluding recipients that, for whatever reason, should not receive replies. It might be the case that "group reply" should be the default, though this would probably be too big a departure from existing behavior.

The use that you're making of Reply-To works fine for individual e-mail,
but when used in the list context, it breaks private reply.

No. regardless of how Reply-To is set, anyone can easily copy-and-paste
an address, or call it up from an address book, etc.

For most of the MUAs I've seen, "easily" is a huge stretch. First, the recipient composing the reply has to notice that reply-to is set. this is difficult because few MUAs bother to provide any kind of alert to this effect. Many MUAs don't even display reply-to fields when viewing a message. Copying and pasting is not necessarily easy even if the recipient notices - especially on systems where you have to click a window to select it, where clicking also raises the window and buries other windows. I've even see cases where copying an address and pasting in another window *of the same app* didn't paste the same text that was copied. Now maybe that's just an isolated bug, but in my experience with windows, macosx, and X11 systems - copy and paste basically sucks on all of them. Then there are of course systems where copy and paste doesn't exist.

Keith


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