On Fri, 30 May 2003 08:08:46 +0100 Ian Bell wrote:
You want something new, here is something new. As an experiment I have subscribed at random to three mailing lists hosted by UK Linux User Groups. They host the mailing lists something in the region of 50 UK Linux User Groups.
Don't they use Majordomo instead of MailMan? If that's the case, Majordomo has a different default set-up than to MailMan. By default, the default Reply-To address is set to the poster. The help system in MailMan states the following reason for setting the default Reply-To address to the Poster as follows:-
"There are many reasons not to introduce or override the Reply-To: header. One is that some posters depend on their own Reply-To: settings to convey their valid return address. Another is that modifying Reply-To: makes it much more difficult to send private replies. See `Reply-To' Munging Considered Harmful for a general discussion of this issue. See Reply-To Munging Considered Useful for a dissenting opinion."
MailMan also has another handy feature (at least in versions 2.1.x and above) that prevent duplicate messages being received by the original poster. For example, if I were to reply to somebody and hit Reply to All, it'd fill the poster's email address and the mailing list address. MailMan will detect that the original poster is receiving a copy and will not send a copy to him/her.
As I have recently set-up MailMan at work to replace the old system of simply using email aliases as a simple form of mailing list, my tests reveal that nobody here suffers from problems replying to the mailing lists we have running on MailMan, and people are using everything between Outlook 97 (and Pegasus Mail) on Windows through to Pine, Mozilla and Sylpheed under IRIX/Linux.
All three of the groups I subscribed to behaved the way I would expect. Messages appear as From: 'Author' To: mailgroup. Pressing reply sends a message to the group as expected. If I want to reply just to the author I just click on his/her email address. I strongly suspect that all the mail groups hosted by the UK Linux User Groups site behave this way, It is clearly good enough and problem free enough for many other LUGs to have it set up this way. It is clearly the way users expect it to be. I see no compelling reason why our mailing list should be different.
They do behave that way, as that's the way the mailing list software works. Whether it was configured that way by the administrators or whether it's the only way the mailing list software copes with Reply-To is another matter. The ALUG mailing list(s) are no different from what I run here at work, and likewise elsewhere that uses MailMan's default setting.
Regards,
Martyn