Can procmail solve the biggest mailing list flame war of all time?
If you're on a mailing list you know the argument. "This list should set Reply-To to the list address" "No it shouldn't" "Yes it should" "No it shouldn't and I've got the Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful link right here".
Personally, I prefer when the list doesn't change Reply-To, since if I run across an interesting free software developer on a mailing list and want to ask him or her to write something for LJ, I can do a "Reply", and if I want to follow up on the list I can do a "List Reply".
But it's easy to understand why some people can be horribly wrong, and why this argument can drag on even longer than classics such as "Hitler was a vegetarian".
Adam Langley, on the p2p-hackers mailing list, posted an answer. if you want Reply-To set to the list, and the listmaster of the righteous-folk list won't do it, put this in .procmailrc:
:0 * List-Id: Righteous folk.* | formail -i "Reply-To: righteous-folk@example.org" >> $MAILDIR/righteous-folk
If you don't want Reply-To set, and the listmaster of the wankers list sets it anyway,
:0 * List-Id: Wankers who munge.* | formail -R "Reply-To" "X-Reply-To" >> $MAILDIR/wankers
(I have modified these recipes slightly to use example.org lists instead of real lists. Substitute yours, and test.)
Randal Schwartz, author of much required reading for Perl hackers, posted a reply to the Portland Linux Unix Group mailing list:
But this breaks any posting made to the list where the originator has set reply-to specifically, including "reply-to: $the_list_in_question" so that they don't get individual replies, or "reply-to: my.mainbox.instead.of.this@yahoo.com.address" if they are borrowing someone else's hookup.So again, setting reply-to cannot be fixed by recipient compensation, while *not* setting reply-to can always be overcome by recipients at will.
The other procmail recipe, to set Reply-To to the list if you want it that way, works fine. Both recipes courtesy Adam Langley on the p2p-hackers mailing list.
Here's another "add reply-to" recipe from Mark C. Langston on the SVLUG list -- it goes the wrong way (munging Reply-To on non-munging lists) so I haven't tried it.
# Get list reply address
: 0
* ^list-(post|ID):
{
REPLYTO=`formail -x list-post: | sed 's/mailto://'`
:0 fw
| formail -i "Reply-To: $REPLYTO"
}
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
