From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: ezyang@MIT.EDU (Edward Z. Yang)
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:34:46 -0400
Subject: [sup-talk] Reply calculation
In-Reply-To: <1248794955-sup-3347@masanjin.net>
References: <1248545266-sup-6886@javelin> <1248546228-sup-9505@javelin>
	<1248548497-sup-1158@javelin> <1248549271-sup-3371@javelin>
	<1248713182-sup-172@entry> <1248713591-sup-8324@javelin>
	<1248794955-sup-3347@masanjin.net>
Message-ID: <1248805830-sup-2383@javelin>

Excerpts from William Morgan's message of Tue Jul 28 11:48:48 -0400 2009:
> > 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.)

Nods.

> > 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 situation is not that uncommon; many mailing list software will notice
that someone is on a CC list and will purposely omit them.

> 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.

This is true. However, when you compose a non-reply message, Sup prompts
you for To, Cc and Subject, because they are such fundamental components
of all messages you would write (well, maybe not so much Cc) and the
user always has to make a judgment call there.

> 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).

Fair enough.  You may get some complaints because this /will/ break muscle
memory, and still presents the possibility for messages to have different
behavior in subtle ways, as detailed in the Cc versus mailing list example
from above.

Cheers,
Edward