On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Steve Lamb wrote:
> My reply to that BS and goes, point by point, tearing it to shreads. As
> I said in a private reply, here's the short form: RFC822 expressly allows
> for the reply-to to be changed for discussion lists. I assume that people
> here *have* read 822?
Some of us have also read draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt-07.txt, which is the
draft of 822's successor. I seem to recall acrimonious religious flame-wars
in the discussion whenever reply-to was mentioned. I've just done a
quick flip through the new draft, and it seems that some of the things
that are said in 822 are no longer said in the new draft. My
recollection of the flame wars is that the world is divided into two
camps, each of which strongly holds to their view of the "right" way to
use Reply-To. The only agreement of any kind was that a simple
"Reply-To" header was probably inadequate to provide the different
services people wanted it to. (In other words, the two camps were seeing
it as providing different kinds of service.) The only way forward
appeared to be designing some new header lines to express more clearly
the different kinds of information people want to add to their messages.
("Do/don't include a cc to me if replying to the list" or "Use this
address for personal replies, that one for "to everybody" replies" etc.)
Since the Working Group is consolidating the standards, not extending
them, this idea was left for someone else to pick up.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
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