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From: wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA (Rich Wales)
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Subject: Ambiguity with the REPLY-TO field
Message-ID: <11545@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 12-Jul-85 20:38:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.11545
Posted: Fri Jul 12 20:38:12 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Jul-85 04:00:30 EDT
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Lines: 26

Jacob --

I believe that the three "typical uses" of REPLY-TO spelled out in
RFC822 (Section 4.4.3, page 22) are intended as three different motiva-
tions for using the feature -- NOT three different possible semantics.

My understanding of the semantics of the REPLY-TO field is that, if it
is present, it is to be used as a substitute for the FROM field when
composing replies to the message.  That is, if a REPLY-TO field exists
in a header, an automatic "reply" operation should ignore the FROM field
completely, under all circumstances, and use the REPLY-TO data instead.

If the sender of the message needs to use a REPLY-TO field, but also
wants to be one of the recipients of any reply, he must include his own
address in the REPLY-TO field along with the addresses of the other
intended recipients.

I am not 100% sure I understood your description of the criteria used by
COM in deciding whether to include the sender in the REPLY-TO field, so
I am not sure whether COM uses REPLY-TO correctly or not.  If you would
like to try again to explain what COM does with REPLY-TO, I will gladly
try to help you figure out whether its use of REPLY-TO follows the
RFC822 semantics, and if it doesn't, whether there is some alternative
approach that would do what you want.

-- Rich