Recently on the list I own I've been encountering requests for people to contact senders off list so that they can get their email addresses and take conversations off list. I believe this has become necessary because some email clients (e.g, most egregiously, Outlook) hide the sender's email address, displaying only the name under an "on behalf of." Thus, Outlook makes it nearly impossible to reply only to the sender; unless you're prepared to claw through the menus and find out how to look at the raw email headers (which none of my subscribers are prepared to do, or know can be done). I know I could configure the list so that reply to sender is the default, but I have resisted this for years on the ground that it's primarily a discussion list, not a venue for announcements, and that configuration suppresses discussion, because people assume they've replied to the list and no one responded. 

I also suspect that other email clients have begun to do the same thing, I guess on the grounds that the less users know the better.

Is there a way to force display of the sender's email address? Some years ago I found out how to display the list name in the subject line, to help people filter list postings into a folder, or simply to recognize what was list mail as opposed to a single email; I'm wondering if there's some way to do something similar with the sender's complete address? I suspect this may be complex; I know that email addresses need to be concealed from nonsubscribers in the archive. 

-- Russ

Russ Hunt
Professor Emeritus of English
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt

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