BLOCK TOM MARGRAVE PLEASE]

[Monty J. Harder]

On Tue, 04 Jul 2000 23:31:53 -0500 Altona Duston <hald at sound.net> writes:

> The From header was NOT munged.  It originated with 

  OK.  We have a semantics problem.  When I send a message to the list,
that is one transaction....  

    > 
    > Yes, it did come from Lowell, the list certainly didn't type it.  
    >

      There are spambots that don't "type" anything, but nobody would
seriously 
    suggest that they don't originate mail.

> Majordomo is just another server in between Lowell and you, and 
> servers are only supposed to add a new received line at the top 
> of the email to indicate that they processed it.

...When it adds:


at the bottom, it has changed the message body.  When it sends x copies
of the message back out, addressed To: the various members of the list,
with the body change, it is sending a new message out, which is
=actually= from the list server, not from the person who posted it to the
list.  You think this "just another server", but I don't.

> For some advocacy see
> http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

<q>
Reply-To munging does not benefit the user with a reasonable mailer.
People want to munge Reply-To headers to make ``reply back to the list''
easy. But it already is easy. Reasonable mail programs have two separate
``reply'' commands: one that replies directly to the author of a message,
and another that replies to the author plus all of the list recipients.
Even the lowly Berkeley Mail command has had this for about a decade. 
</q>

  Well, there are several problems with this idea.  First, I don't see in
the headers where the list recipients are listed (although the fact that
the original message was to: kclug at kclug.org might allow a mail program
to make some assumptions) but even if I did, if someone responded to a
stale message by replying to the list of addresses that happened to have
been subscribed at the time, they'd be including some who'd unsubbed
later (perhaps to use a different account).

  
> http://zseem.ids.bielsko.pl/qmail/koobera/www/proto/replyto.html

  This one makes much more sense.  "Mail-Followup-To" solves the problem
by giving an intelligent mail program an option that doesn't send you two
copies of the same thing.  However, the author says that the list server
shouldn't do this, but leave it to the original poster, which is a
nightmare.  I can go along with the idea that the author might use
Reply-To when using one account to initiate exchanges that properly
belong elsewhere, and that this information should be preserved.  Perhaps
allowing the list server to =add= another Reply-To line, and giving the
mail program user the option of sending to either, both, or whatever?...

  The problem is that mail was originally conceived as 1-1 communication,
or possibly a user-specified alias for a group for bulk mailings.  All of
these "solutions" are stuck within the paradigm of 1-1, not 1-many.  I
see a list as I saw the conferences on the BBS I ran back in the Dark
Ages Before Everyone Got On The Internet:  When you post to a conference,
you have no expectation of privacy; you intend your comments for public
view.  If you wanted a private exchange, we had a thing called "routed
mail" that acted like a poor man's Internet.

  So, in order to make it perfectly clear what is going on, I guess we
need =another= header line, like "Reply-To-List", which would be managed
by the list server itself.  Then all we need to do is get all teh
software to recognize and use it.... Geez.  

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