On Mon June 6 2005 14:58, Keith Moore wrote:
Rather, the whole assumption that the author of a message should be able to
change the behavior of a recipient's user agent is very much in doubt.
That's emphatically NOT the assumption behind the Reply-To field semantics.
"suggestion" != "change the behavior"
It appears to be the assumption behind "Mail-Followup-To", but then that's
not an official message header field and is implemented differently by
the few UAs that pay any attention to it.
Some UAs may in fact change behavior; blame the UAs and/or their authors
if you wish, don't blame the field. Maybe blame RFC 724/822 authors for
the "If there is" sentences (absent from RFCs 733/2822).
[more complaints about particular types of UAs elided]
The only way to make Reply work better is to improve the user interfaces
of mail user agents so that recipients of messages are more easily able to
explicitly choose where their replies go.
Agreed. Maybe UAs, when instructed to respond, should start with "Where
do you want your message to go today?" :-)
To the [extent?] new fields can help
this process, they can only do so by providing more information to a recipient
to inform that choice.
Maybe. Sometimes too much information can make matters worse. Ultimately
a respondent needs to give some thought to the matter, and neither a UA
nor a new header field is a substitute for thought.