Ziggs

Hi,

I am trying to set up Majordomo for a small group of people for a study support mailing list. I followed the UH tutorial and everything seemed to be set up OK.

I tried it out with a few friends and when I hit reply in a received mail from the group, it puts the address of the sender in the 'reply to' to field rather than the address of the mailing list, thus just replying to the sender rather than the whole mailing list!

Am I missing something in the configuration of Majordomo that will enable this. Any help would be most appreciated.

percepts

don't know how to do it, but I used to be on a very active majordomo list and hitting the reply to button would reply to the list and not the originator.
I still have the archives of those messages and the mails always contained:

Reply-To: maillist@listname.com

so do your received mails contain the Reply-To or just the sender. Either way its obviously possible to do, I just don't know how.

__________________
An old dog learning new tricks

Ziggs

Yes percepts - I am on a very busy mailing list as well and the reply-to always sets the address of the list in the 'to' field.

I have just checked the reply-to in one of the mails from my study list, and it is set to the original sender of the email, not the list address - I am flummoxed!

percepts

well you might want to look at this

Majordomo Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

if someone has an out of office automated reply set, then it will send to the list which will then send back to them which will then send to the list which will then send....

so be careful if you sus it. You may have to switch off sending senders messages back to them or you will get a mail loop.

__________________
An old dog learning new tricks

Ziggs

Thanks percepts, I will take a look at this.

JWolfe

You need to set the reply_to variable in the config file to this format.

reply_to = listname@domainname

Of course you have to do this by email, first retrieve the config file, then edit it as above then send it back. Best reference I came across for this is
Majordomo List Owner's Guide.

It is easy in principle, but it gets upset by wordwrap, autoquote etc in email client.
You can download the files directly by ftp from domainname/var/lib/majordomo, but not write them back this way.

JWolfe

By the way, I use this for a group of doctors. Some of the older members hate this, considering it spam. Especially when the freer spirits get off topic a little.
You have been warned!

Euge

Be careful. You may want to consider that doing something like this can embarrass some people, depending on the list participants.

If "John Smith" sends an email to the list, and a member wants to just reply to John, their initial reaction is going to hit reply, write a quick message, then hit send. That is the way it should really work.

If you set it up where reply-to goes to the list, people WILL inadvertently send a message to the list that was meant only for the message originator. Depending on what they write, this can be embarrassing for that person or persons on the mailing list.

My suggestion is not to set the reply-to header, instead include a footer on every message, saying something like, "Use Reply All to reply to the list. Use Reply to reply just to the message originator."

Then people are trained on the difference between Reply and Reply All, which applies to all their emails in general, not just your list.

Ziggs

Hmm...food for thought. I never thought of the potential for embarrassment by forcing a 'Reply-To' to the whole list. Could make for good fun though - there are a couple of mealy-mouthed back stabbers who are members of my list - sit back and watch the fur fly!

Seriously though, thanks for raising the issues of forcing a Reply-To'. I think I will include the reply message in the footer idea.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this thread.

Ziggs

JWolfe

This is what I was hinting at in my second post, but I do it the other way round because I wanted to promote discussion. Every post carries a suggestion to reply only to sender if more appropriate. This is set using the "message_header" in the config file. I also had to set a prefix in the subject line, to ensure people realise the post is from a list.

comedy79

I agree with you on this one. In my experience, some people are untrainable when it comes to using 'Reply All', and in lists I've managed, I've ended up forwarding many many replies to the list that should have gone to the in the first place. And in lists that default to the sender, I'm always having to resend to the list when I realise I've forgotten to use 'Reply All'.

TonyW

I think this is the clincher. If the name of the list is in the subject line, people should realise the email is from and part of the mailing list. I've been on a number of mailing lists with its name in square brackets before the subject; I and others never had problems hitting the Reply-to as we knew we were replying to the list.

The Reply-all can cause other problems because messages can be sent in duplicate, triplicate even. I was on a mailing list once where it was misconfigured and some users hit Reply-all forgetting to remove some addresses it generated. This meant users got the list reply plus an extra one, which caused a few moans.