From: wmorgan-sup@masanjin.net (William Morgan)
Subject: [sup-talk] Reply calculation
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:48:48 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1248794955-sup-3347@masanjin.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1248713591-sup-8324@javelin>
Reformatted excerpts from Edward Z. Yang's message of 2009-07-27:
> From: correct at example.com
> To: correct at example.com
> Reply-To: correct at example.com
> List-Post: mailto:incorrect at example.com
>
> Sup detects List-Post, categorizes the message as a list message, and then
> sets the default reply mode as list, which results in List-Post being used
> as the to address.
So in this case, following reply-to is correct.
> Unfortunately, mailing list administrating is notoriously broken. I'm not
> sure at all what the right solution is. Take for example this other case:
>
> From: person at example.com
> To: list at example.com
> Reply-To: person at example.com
> List-Post: mailto:list at example.com
>
> Reply-To, in this case, was set by the mailing list server.
In this case, I'd argue that this means the list administrator wants the
default reply behavior to be to the individual and not the list. So I'd
again prefer Sup default to the reply-to address rather than the list
address. (With the caveat that this is overrideable by hooks on a
per-list basis, so if it's a matter of an incompetent list
administrator, or simply disagreeing with them, one can override this
behavior for this list.)
> However, consider the next case:
>
> From: persona at example.com
> To: list at example.com
> Cc: me at example.com
>
> Which is when someone else hit "Reply all" and you got CC'ed. This means
> that the mail never passed through the mailing list agent, the
> List-Post/Reply-To
> headers never got set, and the only way to tell that you should reply to the
> whole list is to explicitly ask for "Reply all" semantics (Sup defaults to
> "Reply" semantics, which is damn confusing if you're not paying attention).
There's not much to be done in this case, EXCEPT that if you receive
more than one copy of the message, you should keep the list header
around. Then the only time you're in a funny situation is when you've
received the first but not the other.
This is presumably why Mutt had you register your mailing list addresses
explicitly, which I always found a little irritating.
(Or to have Sup keep around email addresses known to belong to lists,
and match those in the To: field against that, which seems significantly
more complicated.)
> The core problem is that subtle changes in state should not require the user
> to do things differently; it breaks muscle memory and makes mistakes easy.
I agree with this in principle, but I see addressing a message as a
fundamental part of composing it. You can remove the notion of a smart
default reply-to address from your Sup, if you like, by using the
reply-to hook.
And as for the default, I think I'm of the opinion that setting the
default reply address so as to obey the reply-to is correcter than
anything else (including whatever Sup does currently).
--
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-07-28 15:48 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-07-25 18:10 Edward Z. Yang
2009-07-25 18:24 ` Edward Z. Yang
2009-07-25 19:03 ` Edward Z. Yang
2009-07-25 19:15 ` Edward Z. Yang
2009-07-27 16:49 ` William Morgan
2009-07-27 17:09 ` Edward Z. Yang
2009-07-28 15:48 ` William Morgan [this message]
2009-07-28 18:34 ` Edward Z. Yang
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