Reply-To policy

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When you are on a LinuxChix list, and press 'Reply' to a message, you will find that the reply goes to the original poster, not to the entire list. To reply to the entire list, please use the 'Reply to All', 'Group Reply' or 'Reply to List' function of your email client.

Why doesn't the reply-to point to the list?

Jenn Vesperman considered doing so. However, Mail clients have been producing a 'reply-to-list' option. This is, in Jenn's opinion, the best technical solution.

There are two articles on the topic of altering a mailing list's 'Reply-To' header so that using the 'reply' option in the mail client makes mail go just to the list. Jenn recommends that you read both of them. They are Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful and Reply-To Munging Considered Useful. She also had a couple of considerations that aren't explicitly stated in either article.

If we don't change the reply-to, we respect the choice of people who have explicitly set it in their mail client. If we have a technical way of telling who has and who hasn't set it in their client, and only change the ones that haven't set it, then using 'reply' would be a mix of 'to the sender' and 'to the mailing list', and that would be confusing.

In addition, many Free Software groups do not set replies to go to the list. Our members might find it good to be used to having to consciously include the group in replies.

Some mailing list software (including Mailman) now includes an option to avoid mailing a recipient if the recipient is also cc'd in a message. This minimises duplicate messages, and is a technical solution for one of the biggest issues.

With the institution of DMARC by some major mail providers, LinuxChix has had to change some settings in Mailman so the mailing list messages are DMARC compliant. This has the effect of appending the original poster's email address to any existing 'Reply-To' header for some members. Please see Mailing Lists Changes for a full explanation.

Discussion of new, additional points on the subject is on-topic for most LinuxChix lists. Discussion of the existing points in relation to LinuxChix lists is welcome on the open-topic mailing lists, but not specific-topic lists. (It's on-topic for technical lists if you're asking about it for your lists.)