The reply_to variable is used to set the "Reply-To: "
field in the headers of the email message. When someone receives
a message with this field set, their email program defaults
to responding to the address in the "Reply-To: " field.
There is a potential problem with setting the "Reply-To: " to be
the list itself. If someone goes on vacation and has a particularly
unintelligent auto-responder set up, what can happen is that a
listmember will send a message to the list. This will go to the
person on vacation, who generates an autoreply to the list (because
of the "Reply-To" setting). The list then sends that message to
the listmembers (including the original sender), which generates
another autoresponse, etc. Quickly, everyone can end up with
hundreds of messages.
It mostly doesn't happen because either:
- Good auto-responders keep
a database of addresses where they've already sent a response, or
- The autoresponse gets caught by BIGLIST's filters which look for
phrases like "away from my mail" and "on vacation," etc.
Another issue we've seen is that when there's a problem delivering
a message to one of the list members, some mail delivery software
(incorrectly) sends a report of the error to the Reply-To address
rather than to the original sender. If this is set to the list
address, then everyone will receive the cryptic error message. This
generally isn't a problem since we have filters set up for these
types of messages, but if one sneaks by,
let us know and we'll
figure out how to catch it next time.
Most email programs have 2
different reply functions - one to go to the original sender
("reply"), and one to go to everyone ("group reply"), so some people
prefer that the "Reply-To: " not be set, since email programs generally
default to the "Reply-To: " address. It's really up to the list
owner and members.
A longer, more passionate view of the setting of the "Reply-To: "
field can be found by following
this link.
