[mythtv-users] Replying to mailing lists

[Joseph Fry]

>> The real problem, of course, is that almost *no* email clients understand
>> mailing lists; when replying to a mailing list, you address your reply to
>> the incoming email's "To" header, rather than the more common "From"
>> header.
>
> ...
>>
>> Smarter lists will use RFC 2919 compliant headers to tell mail user agents
>> to perform special handling, but -- again -- MUAs smart enough to know
>> what to do about them are thin on the ground.
>
>
> Smarter lists also use the Reply-To header which makes it easy to
> provide a good default. :)

Thats called reply-to munging, and is actually not compliant (violates
RFC 2822)... though I prefer it as well as all the lists I use are
much more focused on public discussion.  I rarely send off-list
messages to folks on the list.

see http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html and
any other of a million discussions on the topic.  While it's still
widely done, and most email providers/clients work just fine, it is a
standards violation and therefore can potentially cause problems with
services/clients that follow the RFC.

The greatest concern is for those that participate in several email
lists using a decent mail reader.  On many lists, off list discussions
are the norm, and thus the reply-to-sender (rfc compliant) as default
is valuable.  If your lists are a mix of reply-to-sender and
reply-to-list, you WILL eventually accidentally reply to an individual
when you intended it for the list, or worse, send an email to a list
when it was intended for an individual (often one that can cause
embarrassment or worse).