On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 15:13 +0100, James Freer wrote:
Wayne
Thanks for replying. I did mean to send it to the list. It seems that one has got to enter TO: main address each email to this group. When one just does REPLY it goes direct to the sender - that's what i did this time. I don't know why it should be this way on this group as others like yahoo all go straight to the list... that's the way it should work.
To be honest that behaviour is more down to your mail client than the list, and looking at your headers you aren't using a mail client but google's webmail interface. A lot of mail clients have a reply to list button that reads the header in the mail from the list which announces it as a list and provides the correct reply address, others allow you to set a default reply address for a folder and then have a rule drop the alug mails into this folder. Unfortunately I think most webmail (inc google) lacks this functionality.
The reason it is done this way is to preserve the reply-to header rather than rewriting it, this is considered the "correct" behaviour but unfortunately not all mail clients support it. Hence things like yahoo groups do it the "technically wrong" way and rewrite the reply-to header to be the list address.
It has been a matter of debate on the list several times and comes up for discussion once in a while. But the general consensus each time is to leave it the correct way and deal with it at the client end.