And FWIW, I'm in agreement with the view that Reply-To is too messed up
to be salvaged.
(once again) What are the specific issues that you have in mind?
The way Reply-To is implemented, it is rarely useful and the behavior can
be confusing to repliers. But the marginally useful behavior is very
widely deployed, and there are a few circumstances where it is useful.
Changing how reply-to works probably wouldn't work very well because
(a) there's no way to determine the sender's intent (did he want the
old behavior or the new behavior?)
(b) it would make the effect of setting reply-to even less predictable
than it is now
(c) it would break behavior that is occasionally useful (e.g.,
setting reply-to on a message with one recipient is unambiguous).
Even though the current behavior is very sub-optimal,
it is still occasionally useful and there are a lot of people who expect
it to work the way it does now.
Use of From (ignoring Reply-To when present), as you have
suggested is a change to the standard response protocols.
I've suggested lots of things. I haven't seen any suggestion, by me or
anybody else, that doesn't have some drawbacks.
The sole changes are (1) added support for narrow
responses to the From field mailboxes for UAs which do not
already have such a mechanism,
Except that (a) we'd still like to have ways for an author to recommend
that replies go elsewhere (i.e. a way that actually makes sense when the
replier chooses "reply all") and (b) lots of people would like to have
a simple way of minimizing duplicate copies of replies.
and (2) wide responses
possibly including From even when Reply-To is present.
that's just nuts. if reply-to is present, the sender almost certainly
intended it to substitute for from, since that's how it almost universally
works these days. replying to both is completely wrong.
Keith