Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA 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 Lines: 39 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?