Reply-to in email subscription

[zeborah]

Currently if you're subscribed to a group by email, the emails come with the author's display address as the reply-to address. People mightn't notice and hit reply, thinking they're replying to the whole group; confusion could ensue.

Suggestion until email posting is implemented:
a) use a from/reply-to of eg Zeborah <no-reply@…>; and
b) at the bottom of the email include a direct link to reply to the post online.

[ajk]

I don't see the problem, and I don't see how (a) helps.

(b) is something that will have to be done, yes.

[zeborah]

If someone hits reply, expecting it to go to the group, then

1) it won't get to the group, and there won't be any immediate feedback to the person to tell them so, so they might not realise for some time and/or be puzzled about the reason (I'm thinking of less techy folk who get confused at all sorts of things and I think this would be one of them);

2) it will go directly to the original author (unless they've munged their email address) who may wonder why they're being contacted directly instead of on-list.

With a no-reply email, I was envisaging that they'd get an immediate email response (either a bounce or a friendlier message) to explain that they can't email posts to the group yet.

[ajk]

Right, we are getting close to the Religious Stuff :-)

For me, reply is always personal. The fact that some mailing lists break this exceptation is both horrible (it opens the door for an accidental disclosure of private stuff) and symptomatic of what is wrong on the email system (namely, the bad standard of excellence among the popular mail reading clients).

I'll make two additonal observations here:

1) The display email address ends up as the From line only when one posts from the web.

2) The same From line appears on NNTP articles.

[ajk]

The suggestions in the original report were "until email posting is implemented", but it already is. Can you describe what you would consider an adequate fix of this in the current circumstance?

[zeborah]

Hmm, I think a signature block saying:

--
To reply to this message on $group.name$ use your email's "Reply to all" option.
To unsubscribe [is there an unsubscribe-by-email option?] or visit [$group.url$ or $thread.url$].

[ajk]

Done in changeset:11cf105fe323361072281747558cb61752f33fa8