Keith Moore writes:
Actually some people are proposing blind acceptance. They want MFT
to be honored automagically, regardless of the content of the reply.
No. Mail-Followup-To does _not_ override the wishes of the user
sending the followup. It is simply a _default_ recipient list.
...
You say that some MUAs have bad list-editing interfaces: in
particular, they don't make the recipient list clear to the user.
That's certainly something to fix---no matter what the default
recipient list is! You keep bringing this up in a Mail-Followup-To
context as if it were a new problem; but the same problem existed long
before Mail-Followup-To.
agreed.
I think there are some problems with the very notion of a
sender-settable _default_ recipient list - one that encourages the
reader to use that list for replies without thinking about it. This is
equally a problem for MFT or Reply-To, and probably for other ways of
setting that default. And while it's certainly possible to build MUAs
that don't treat MFT or Reply-To or whatever as a "default" but instead
do something else with it - let the user choose it explicitly, insist
that the user make an explicit choice, whatever - I wonder if it will
violate the sender's expectation if recipients consciously choose to
reply to somewhere else.
Both MFT and Reply-To seem to expect repliers to understand, via
out-of-band information, the relationships between the specified
recipients and the other recipients of a message when the repliers they
make a conscious choice. They don't say _why_ the replies are being
redirected that way, or give any guidance about what to do if the
replier wants to change the default. Or perhaps they assume (not
entirely without justification) that repliers will rarely bother to make
a conscious choice, so the number of misdirected replies that result
from such choices will not be significant.
Because I'm looking at how to make email more effective, one of the
things I'm concerned about is the rarity of conscious choice when
replying to emails. So I'm wondering if there are ways that MUAs can
be improved to encourage conscious choices without being too annoying.
And because I want to encourage conscious choices if it is possible to
do so (and I'm not sure that it is), I'm wary of new header fields which
seem to assume that users will not make conscious choices. I think such
fields could even discourage conscious choice, by creating a wider
expectation that the recipient will do what the sender said (thus
negative feedback if the recipient does something different even when he
had a good reason); and because, lacking information as to _why_ the
sender set MFT, the recipient might decide (again, without much
justification) that the sender's judgement is better than his own.
As I think I said earlier, if I do manage to find time to construct an
MUA to try out some of these ideas, I'll arrange for it to recognize
MFT, alert the replier to its presence, and make it easy for the replier
to use that recipient list. It won't be quite like treating MFT as a
default but maybe it will strike an appropriate balance.
Keith