[Haskell-cafe] Silly mail client

[ls-haskell-developer-2006 at m-e-leypold.de]

Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:

> OK, this is hacking me off now... Does ANYBODY know how I can convince
> Thunderbird to send replies to Haskell Cafe rather than sending them
> to the original poster? This is really becoming tiresome...

My best approach to that has been to explicitely rewrite the Reply-To
with procmail when the mail arrives at my place. The problem is, that
the 'List-Id' tag will only work, if all clients stick to the implied
rules (which they don't) and if you don't have a MTA or mailbox
storage (like cyrus) which eliminates duplicates (then answers copied
to you arrive earlier, leading to elimination of the copy with the
List-Id tag). After long and careful study I've come to the conclusion
that every magic based on headers inserted by the mailing list and
based on all participants mail clients sticking to some rules won't
work.

Originally, as I understand it, the Mail-Followup-To field had been
intended to indicate an address for "reply to list". But most mail
clients don't support it. I'm not sure wether Thunderbird supports it,
but I've heard a "reply all" would reply to the address indicated in
Mail-Followup-To. The problem is anyway (a) Haskell Cafe does not
provide the field and (b) duplicate elimination would quite possibly
kick the wrong mail copy (that which has Mail-Followup-To set). 

So my suggestion:

 1) Use procmail
 2) Detect haskell-cafe in the headers
 3) Add the List-Id and Mail-Followup-To at you side.

 4) If you have client which doesn't respect Mail-Followup-To (try
    "reply all"), then also add a Reply-To header.

(4) means, if you wan't to reply by mail to the individual author,
    you'll have to edit the receiver address by hand.

Regards -- Markus