ietf-822
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Re: reply options

2004-09-06 10:57:58

On Mon, 06 Sep 2004, Keith Moore wrote:
I want at least five reply options:

 "Reply"            (uses Reply-To header, falls back to From header)
 "Reply to author"  (uses From header)
 "Reply to sender"  (used Sender header, falls back to From header)
 "Reply to all"     (uses all possible addresses, lets me edit the 
                    list)
 "Followup"         (somehow figures out how to send to mailing list)

I'm curious - when would you use "Reply" or "Reply to sender"?  or to 
ask the question another way, what assumptions are you making about how 
"Reply-to" and "Sender" fields are used that would cause you to want 
those functions?

The Reply-To header says where the author suggests that ordinary replies
should go.  "Ordinary" replies are whatever the author thinks will be
the most common type of reply to this particular message.  A missing
Reply-To means just use the From address.  Authors often want to suggest
that ordinary replies should go somewhere other than the From address;
for example, to a mailing list.

If the author has suggested that replies should go elsewhere, but I
really want to contact the author, then I want to invoke a "Reply to
author" function in my mailer, and that function should use the From
address.  This can easily happen when the author suggests that ordinary
replies (say discussing the meat of a proposal) should go to a mailing
list, but I want to make a response of a different sort (say discussing
the formatting of the proposal, or pointing out a typo that the mailiing
list doesn't need to discuss).

If my response is related to the addressing of the message (say I have
recently changed addresses, or will soon change addresses), or the
formatting of the email wrapper around the author's work, then I want to
send my response to the Sender.

I am aware that some user agents don't allow senders to override the
From field, and that Reply-To gets used in cases where I would advocate
overriding the From.  I am also aware that, when a message has a
Reply-To field, some user agents make it difficult to reply to the
author or sender.  I think that people should not use such user agents.

--apb (Alan Barrett)