>
>Setting the list reply-to list, ignore is not a good policy.  Sometimes you
>want the option of sending a query to the list which would only be of interest
>to the person and just a spam for the rest of the list.

In which case I send a private e-mail to the individual person(s) knowing
that the other people are not interested.  By using the ignore option, it
ensures that mail software will not interfere with the ability to
adequately send things to the list.

One of the reasons I looked into getting a listserv address for my list
was because there were certain people in my list who seemed unable to
change their mailer preferences so that they could use a "reply-to-all" to
respond to a group message.  This problem seemed to occur from two of the
people on my list from two different ISPs, and it was very frustrating to
them because they were not getting replies from their queries to the
group, because their replies to somebody elses message was always bounced
back to that person, and never bounced back to the group.  Thus, without
list, ignore, I would have the same problem that was one of the reasons I
went to a list in the first place.

>From a philosophical
>point of view, I despise the idea of using the limiting "ignore" option because
>a mailer is not configured intelligently.  The most flexible option is to
>change the mailer option.

Not so fast there.  My university has been working on an LAN project for
the past few years, and has had to make do with one of three mail client
programs.  The university is running under OpenVMS 7.1 at current, and the
default mail program is All-In-1, a program which seems to ignore the
reply-to header anyway.  Another option is to use a much more tedious mail
program called VMSmail, and I do not know whether or not there is a
problem with reply-to headers and that, but I suspect there is only
because when using All-In-1, essentially, it supercedes VMSmail in all of
its usage of the mail resources for any particular account.

Then, of course, there is pine, but the abilitity to configure the use of
pine from the use of All-In-1 or VMSmail is very difficult to do, and
requires a lot of jumping through hoops to get it to work properly.  I do
not know if that would have solved some of my problems or not though, and
frankly, for my preferences, I find pine a very tedious mail program to
use, although it probably has some significant advantages over VMSmail and
All-In-1, such as the ability to properly extract binary file
attachments....

Anyway, this seemed to go a bit off topic so I should probably end this
message here....

>Bob Zenhausern, Ph.D.        [log in to unmask]

Glenn Alperin
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