Reply-to: should be viewed as advisory

[Al Gilman]

to follow up on what Ulrich Windl said:

> P.S. Usually you should reply to the "Reply-To:" of a message...

I hope that you were not too overworked by receiving two copies
of my reply.  There are various good reasons for departing from
the norm you cite at times.

The Reply-To: mechanism in Internet mail and particularly in
mailing list usage is too inflexible to do everything that should
be done, so I act on my own situation assessment and not always
what is in the email header.

Did I fail to Cc: the list?  I am erratic in following even my own
principles.  I meant to write to you with Cc: to the list.  Since
mail that comes through the list comes equally from subscribers and
non-subscribers, I sometimes send mail directly to the person I
am answering when it appears they may not be subscribed.  

One minor detail that affects what I did that you may not be aware
of is that I did not receive your post via electronic mail, but
by HTTP from the archive.  I am not subscribed to the list at the
moment.  If I am going to take the trouble to hand-edit the 
In-Reply-To header value by inspecting the source of an archive
HTML page, I am not going to feel too bound by automated defaults
that are oversimplified to serve automated Reply actions.

There is a chronic problem with mailing lists that the group
cannot agree whether the Reply-To: header for messages
distributed by the mailing list manager should be set to point to
the list as the message passes through the mailing list manager,
or whether on the other hand the Reply-To: should be left exactly
as the originating author sent it.  Neither solution is wholly
satisfactory, so far as I can tell; so I make my own decisions
about how to address the mail.

Hope you continue to enjoy Lynx.

Regards,

Al Gilman