Timothy Luoma and Sean Straw both said they were trying to preset Reply-To:
back to the list on particular posts here. Both those posts came through
with no Reply-To: nor even a Resent-Reply-To: header at all. That is not the
advertised default behavior of SmartList and NOT a good idea. Of course, the
default reply address in each case was the author's From: line.
I have just sent a post defending group-replying and saying that people who
don't like getting two copies should handle it at their end, but I did not
consider the case of a post whose author specifically pointed Reply-To: to
the list and so stated in the text or the signature block. Certainly, if a
poster takes the step of setting Reply-To:, his or her wish should generally
be honored, whether it points to the list or elsewhere. (That's one of the
many arguments against clobbering Reply-To: by forcing it to the list.)
Stripping Reply-To: defeats that.
Goodness knows that I don't strip it on the list that I run! Submitted
Reply-To: headers survive unmolested. I had figured that the absence of
Reply-To: on their articles indicated the absense of any Reply-To: on their
submissions, and I spoke accordingly.
If Eli, Sean, Wotan, and others who feel as they do would point Reply-To: to
the list in posts where they want only public responses and it survived, that
would be a whole different story. (It would be nice, also, if Sean's and
Eli's sigs were likewise revised slightly to say, "I've directed replies to
the list and solely to the list. Please make sure that your mailer does not
override that.")
[I believe that if To: and Reply-To: both point to the list, or in any other
case where Reply-To: differs from From:, Elm will not source the poster's
address from From: if asked to group-reply. However, if the incoming post
was itself a group reply and addresses of yet previous posters are in To: or
Cc:, a group reply may pick those up, but surely someone who is strongly
against group replies would not be group-replying himself.]
If they have already been pointing Reply-To: to the list and this list has
been stripping it, that changes my stand greatly, and I apologetically re-
tract much of what I said in my previous post as not applying personally to
Mr. Straw nor to Mr. the Bearded.
Just as another test, I am pointing Reply-To: on this submission to
another account of mine; let's see if it survives the list configuration.
DWT