Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
In trying to project the seemingly unlimited set of possible reply
semantics onto the visibly limited set of concepts that are
comprehensible to the typical user, I keep coming back to the notion
that there are really only 3 cases that are, at a first approximation,
comprehensible to most mortals:
-- Reply to the user who sent the message.
-- Reply to the "discussion community" of the message (see below)
-- Reply highly idiosyncratically (i.e. let the user self-edit the headers)
That is, I'm hypothesizing (fairly confidently) that the vast majority
of users won't be willing or able to differentiate beyond these three
cases (and most won't even use the third).
[...]
How would people feel about a strategy of clarifying a "default"
algorithm for followup mail, and standardizing a "Wide-Reply-To"
override? -- Nathaniel
You started with 3 alternatives: "default", "wide", and "narrow"
might be appropriate terms, where the default or "recommended"
response could be set by the original message author(s), narrow
would be a response to the author(s), and wide would be a response
including the default plus additional original message recipients
(and would probably be edited by respondents). Those three happen
to be exactly what the MUA "pine" supports, and there are other
MUAs that support those three plus others. In terms of existing
fields, "narrow" responses would go to mailboxes specified in the
original message From field (MUAs might provide additional types
of narrow responses for advanced users, such as using Sender or
Return-Path), the recommended addresses could be specified by the
author via Reply-To, and wide responses would go to Reply-To+To+Cc.
That imposes no new requirements on MTAs, and MUA support for
narrow replies (for MUAs that do not already provide such
capability) is the only addition. While such support is being
added to MUAs, the existing semantics of "plain" responses
correspond to the default/recommended type. "Reply-all" will
continue to correspond to wide responses.