Re: Understanding response protocols

> > What I don't agree with is the notion that honoring such requests 
> > should happen "by default", i.e. without the recipient being aware of 
> > it and choosing it explicitly.
> I am quite happy with the idea of a configuration option for my MUA 
> that says "enable MTF-handling" (for instance). I am even happy with 
> the default being "disabled". My MUA already has an option "always 
> honour Reply-to"; I suspect that if MFT were "standardised" or in some 
> way  "blessed" by the community, an option would be provided. But I 
> really would like to have SOMETHING that is better than where we are 
> now.
Me too.  But what's clear to me is that we're in this mess largely 
because we've come to expect MUAs to "do the right thing" when it's 
really the reply author's job to specify what the right thing is.  We 
can't fix the problem with additional header fields and additional 
automation in the recipient's MUA.
Now if recipients had suitable MUAs we could define ways by which 
senders could provide hints to recipients about what the senders think 
is the "right thing", and the MUAs could make it easy to comply with 
the sender's wish if the recipient chose to do so.  But as soon as 
recipients' MUAs try to use those hints to automate decisions that need 
to be explicitly made by the recipient _on a per-message basis_ when 
composing a reply, we will have a worse mess than we have now.
Keith