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* Mark Fowler <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx> [2003-09-12 11:11 +0100]:
> Why don't email clients have the ability to send and parse more
> meta-data about who the correct _people_ to reply to are?
Largely because no one's standardized it. Take your pick from From:
(standard, single person only, may not be where you want replies to go),
Reply-To: (also standard, long history of being altered by mailing lists,
may be your alternate email address but not where you want group replies
to go), Mail-Followup-To: (dead draft standard that some MUAs follow, if
they feel like it), and Mail-Reply-To: (if you're Dan Bernstein).
They all suck, for one reason or another. And realistically, the
situation's not going to get better, because no one really wants to alter
entrenched standards by adding more fields. De-facto standards aren't
going to arise, either, because MUAs are too disparate and, in many cases,
too convinced of their own rightness to work with others. (Witness the
flamewars between PGP/MIME people and text/plain PGP people, and that one
is an RFC. (That would also make a nice rant. Note for future.))
> [Example: mail to a group of people]
Mail-Followup-To: should work here, provided everyone's MUA supports it.
> [Example: correction on a group mail]
Given support, you reply to the sender and set your Mail-Followup-To:
header to the group.
Of course, you could also abuse the Reply-To: header to the same purpose.
(Or could you? Can you put multiple addresses in a Reply-To:? Too lazy
to check.)
> But no, our software is dumb. And so my inbox is full of crud.
"All mail clients suck." -- Michael Elkins
--
...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/
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