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Re: Reply-To (Was: Spaces in the subject line.)

2002-06-02 16:47:08

On Sun, 2 Jun 2002, Nancy McGough wrote:

   It is, to my knowledge, unheard of for a USER to munge a reply-to 
pointing
back to a mailing list. Some listmasters seem to think it's a good thing to
make this munge (I find it silly, and remove it from those lists who have
listmasters wrong-headedly choosing to add it),   [ ... ]


This topic has been debated to death in almost every mailing list
I've ever subscribed to. Please, let's not repeat it here. If
you're interested, you can read all about it here

Since this topic should not be repeated here, I won't do it either;)
However, out of all the food-fights related to this topic, I have
never participated in any and feel a little left out:( 
 
 What is a From Header and Where Do Replies Go
  <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/changing_from/#what>

Thank you for your wonderful link. I went there before posting and to
my delight, I found and read:

* Simon Hill's Reply-To Munging Considered Useful: An Earnest
  Plea to Mailing List Administrators:
http://www.metasystema.org/essays/reply-to-useful.mhtml

To my surprise, he pretty much crystalized my sentiments and the requests
of listowners _and_ their subscribers of mailing lists I have hosted for
other on my servers, as well as acknowledging the danger of poorly
configured autoresponders which begs the need for more solutions to 
mail-loop detection as opposed to other more abstract speculation
and seems to be left out of the other 'earnet pleas' not to munge
headers. And, Simon did what I did to another mailing list that has a high
regard for it's opinion of listservice, he actually quoted the text from
RFC-822 which specifies that 'Reply-To: ' header munging _is_ an intended
purpose of the 'Reply-To: ' header.

Among other things, I have links to the following often-cited
articles

This is a fine list of references, but perhaps next time, URL's or other
locations could be included.
 
* Keith Moore's reply-problem-list.txt

* Chip Rosenthal's ``Reply-To'' Munging Considered Harmful: An
  Earnest Plea to Mailing List Administrators

Until I am corrected, I regard Mr. Rosenthal's "Plea" to be a huge
disservice to the Internet community. He prefaces his "Plea" by
citing RFC-822 and RFC-1123 for some reason and invites the reader
to read through this tome of complicated email engineering technocery. 
Being the type of fellow I am, I accepted the challenge and found
nothing in those RFC's to support Mr. Rosenthal's position, infact,
to the contrary referred to above.

I attempted to contact Mr. Rosenthal for comment on this observation
and received no response. I noticed some other evangelist promulgating
this belief system on the public Internet and once again, received no
response to my inquiry from that person either. And, I posted as much
to a familiar listserver mailing list and only received comments regarding
subjective preferences, not how 'Reply-To:'  relates to RFC-822 and
RFC-1123.

Unfortunately, I don't know where to quickly find:

* comp.mail.pine: Re: rfc 2369 commands

so I don't know what that is about, but, doing keyword searches on
the RFC 2369 document, which starts out:

"   command directly. The three core header fields described in this
   document are List-Help, List-Subscribe, and List-Unsubscribe."

but yields:

"A.8. The Dangers of Header Bloat

   At what point are there just too many header fields?  It really
   varies on a list by list basis. On some lists, the majority of users
   will never be aware of a field unless the client software provides
   some alternative user interface to it (akin to the Reply-To field).
   On others, the users will often see the header fields of messages and
   would be able to recognize the function of the URLs contained within.

   The flexibility afforded by the protocol described in this document
   (in that the header fields may be individually implemented as deemed
   appropriate) provides list administrators with sufficient 'room to
   maneuver' to meet their individual needs."

Cheers,

--Paul

--
William J. Broad: "The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass
of the universe seems to be missing."

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