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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!Jacob_Palme_QZ%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
From: Jacob_Palme_QZ%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Subject: Ambiguity with the REPLY-TO field
Message-ID: <11542@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 12-Jul-85 19:42:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.11542
Posted: Fri Jul 12 19:42:46 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Jul-85 02:03:54 EDT
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
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RFC822 says that the REPLY-TO field can be used in three different
ways:
(a) Author wants his return mail to some other mailbox somewhere
(b) Author may want additional people to get replies
(c) Replies should be sent to a distribution list

The problem with this is that many mail systems have two commands
for writing replies. The name of these commands are different
in different mail systems, I will here call them "personal reply"
and "group reply". A "personal reply" is only sent to the author
of a message, a "group reply" is sent to a group of people, usually
all the recipients of the commented message.

Now, the first of the three uses of the REPLY-TO field given
above corresponds to "personal reply" while the other two corresponds
to "group reply". Thus, a mail system implementing both the "personal
reply" and the "group reply" command will find it difficult to
know whether the reply-to field is of type (a), (b) or (c).

I have got complaints from some people that COM consistently
produces REPLY-TO fields of type (b) and (c). The complainers
have mail systems, which apparently interprets the REPLY-TO field
to always be of type (a), and thus use this in their "personal
reply" command.

However, I have strong reasons in COM for using the REPLY-TO
field in the (b) and (c) sense. The reason for this is that I
want to distinguish between the case when the author is a member
of a conference to which the message is sent and not. When the
author is a member of such a conference, replies should NOT be
sent personally to the author, but rather to the conference.
But if the author is not a member of the conference, replies
should be sent both to the author and the conference. (The same
principle, of course, would apply to mailing lists.) COM indicates
this by including the author in the REPLY-TO field if he is not
a member of any conference also receiving the message, but otherwise
not including the author in the REPLY-TO field.

Is this wrong?