Thanks Mr Buzz Kill with your well researched and logical arguments. Well my research indicates that I like reply-to-list better. While your points are certainly valid I think that 99% of the time on a list like this one the default action would be reply-to-list and if someone does accidentally reply to the list when they didn't want to it would most likely be some side geekery too inane for public consumption. I could see how the "Lets talk about our cheating abusive husbands/wives/hamsters" list might not be that way. But I'll change my vote to: Whatever AND IF YOU DONT AGREE WITH ME YOU CAN COME TP MY HOUSE AT 1006 SUMMIT AVENUE! On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 3:24 AM, Dave Sherohman <dave at sherohman.org> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 01:03:32PM -0600, Yaron wrote: > > On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > > I also have root access to the mailing list server, so if I wanted to > be > > > autocratic about it I could just make the change unilaterally. However, > I > > > think that would be rather irresponsible. > > > > Well, so far we've got quite a few people saying they'd like the change, > a > > couple of people saying they don't need the change, and zero people > saying > > they're against it. > > I've been holding my tongue thus far, as I'm no longer local to the LUG, > but, since you've said that there's nobody against it... I'm against > it. > > The canonical list of arguments against lists setting Reply-To would be > Chip Rosenthal's ""Reply-To" Munging Considered Harmful"[1], but that's > pretty ancient these days. Google's first hit on it is a copy dated > 2002, but Simon Hill's response, "Reply-To Munging Considered > Useful"[2], dates to at least 2000, so it's clearly older than that. > > At some later point, Neale Pickett published ""Reply-To" Munging Still > Considered Harmful. Really."[3], in which he points out that, per RFC2822, > Reply-To is specifically to be used to indicate where the message's > author wants replies directed. He then goes on to argue that, since the > list management software is not the author of the message, it is a > direct violation of the RFC for list software to set Reply-To. (It > should use List-Post instead, as defined in RFC2369. Unfortunately, > well over a decade later, clients which properly recognize List-Post > headers remain thin on the ground.) > > > Now that the historical archive has been presented, I'll finally get to > my reason for opposing the use of Reply-To headers by mailing list: > It's a matter of privacy and security. > > Put simply, if a message which is intended to be public is sent > privately, it causes little to no harm. As already seen on this thread, > it's easy for the recipient to include it in a public response, or the > original sender can trivially re-send it to the correct address. The > net result is a minor inconvenience for the sender (who has to send it > twice) and possibly a minor annoyance for the private version's > recipient (who will receive two copies unless their mail software is > smart enough to filter out the duplicate). > > A message intended to be private which is unintentionally made public, > on the other hand, can cause significant harm, ranging from simple > embarassment[4] to professional problems[5] to actual physical > danger[6]. Even when you consider that Reply-To munging will prevent > more problems than it causes, the potential damage caused by a single > exposure of private information is so much greater than the damage > caused by replies being unintentionally private that I believe, in the > balance, the net harm caused by Reply-To munging is greater than the net > benefit it provides. > > > But, like I said, I'm no longer local to the LUG and I hardly ever post > here any more, so I don't really have a dog in this fight. My main > point is simply to present the arguments against Reply-To munging by > mailing list software because nobody else has done so. If you decide to > start setting Reply-To headers anyhow, it's no skin off my teeth. > > > [1] http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html > [2] http://www.metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.mhtml > [3] http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html<http://woozle.org/%7Eneale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html> > [4] Someone discovering that you're going out with friends > after lying to them about being sick > [5] A journalist accidentally revealing connections to an anonymous > source > [6] See "Harriet Jacobs" (pseudonym), whose contacts and Google Reader > data were automatically exposed to her abusive ex-husband by the > Buzz launch; unfortunately, while you can find many references to > the incident, her original rant describing it is no longer public > > -- > Dave Sherohman > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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