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Re: the most obvious failure in To-NoReply


D. J. Bernstein wrote:
Keith Moore writes:

you're free to set Reply-To to ietf-822@xxxxxxx 


I don't want _replies_ to go to ietf-822@xxxxxxxx I want _followups_
to go to ietf-822@xxxxxxxx

"followup" is a Usenet term. Usenet has two different kinds of addresses - email addresses and newsgroups. Responses to the author's email address are replies; responses to newsgroups are followups. Email does not have visibly different kinds of addresses and does make a distinction between replies and followups. Email UAs have "reply" and "reply to all" or similar. For several reasons including both protocol differences and cultural differences between email and Usenet, email's "reply to all" and Usenet's "followup" are not quite the same thing. And I don't see evidence of any desire among users to make email more like Usenet. (actually I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. but I digress.)

Every popular MUA has separate reply/followup functions;  that's what
users want.

Every popular MUA has separate "reply" and "reply all" functions. I'm quite willing to believe that a significant plurality of users want both of these functions. (I'm not sure about "most" as I keep running into users who don't seem to understand the difference between "reply" and "reply to all". It may be that most users never learn to choose - they just hit one button or another out of habit, or at random.)

An increasing number of MUAs support the sender specifying
a followup list (normally with Mail-Followup-To) that doesn't include
the reply list; that's what users want.

A few MUAs support MFT. The ones I've seen that support MFT represent an insignificant part of the installed base, so I don't accept an argument that the level of MUA spport for MFT is an indication of user preference.

For that matter, the most widely used OS by far is rife with security holes and has been for nearly 10 years now, but I don't accept that as an indication of user preference for security holes.

It seems to me that you've had a lot of time to try to get MFT widely accepted in the marketplace. Your failure to do so doesn't necessarily mean that MFT is bad, and it says nothing about the relative merits of MFT vs. NR. But it probably does mean that claims that equate market acceptance with rightness are moot in this discussion.