ietf-822
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mail-followup-to / mail-copies-to

2005-05-24 11:52:15

Hi,

Is anyone doing work on some kind of header to allow senders to indicate reply preferences (particularly for list mail)?

There appear to be a variety of implementations now recognising Mail-Followup-To, unfortunately with various incompatible interpretations of it.

Also, at least one implementation appears (depending on configuration, or the version - i'm not sure) to consider a /lack/ of an MFT to mean that the sender of an email being "list-reply" deliberately did not insert an MFT and hence does not wish to be included in a reply.

Other implementations treat MFT to be the exclusive address to follow-up to.

It's an absolute mess, one which (as one of the seemingly few people who prefer to receive both list and 'direct' copies on list replies) causes me a lot of pain, as I have no way to indicate my preference in a reliable fashion and as many people now use MUAs which suppress personal copies by default.

The IETF should, IMHO, work on clarifying the matter, be it:

- that MFT will never be standardised and implementations should
  *not* interpret it

or

- Standardise the behaviour of Mail-Followup-To and/or Mail-Copies-To

Anyone have views on this? (In particular, could anyone give me a potted history - this apparently comes up regularly, but nothing ever seems to make it to standards track..)

regards,
--
Paul Jakma      paul(_at_)clubi(_dot_)ie        paul(_at_)jakma(_dot_)org       
Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
Entropy requires no maintenance.
                -- Markoff Chaney