NNTP client configuration

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, February 20, 2018 19:20:27 Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On 2/20/2018 4:26 PM, Manu wrote:
> > I shouldn't have your email
> > address in the reply-to header (as Jonathan has noted multiple times).
>
> I do that deliberately as a service to those who wish to contact me
> privately about something I posted, which happens now and then.

I think that it's also pretty common for the e-mail address of posters to
end up being visible somewhere for mailing lists - enough so that using an
e-mail address that you don't want to be public is risky.

Either way, having the poster's e-mail address in the Reply-To header is a
problem, because that's going to tell the e-mail client to send a reply
there. So, if the poster's e-mail address is going to be somewhere in the
headers, it needs to be in a different header (e.g. the From header).

Looking back at e-mails from the mailing list from the last few years, it
looks like it used to be the case that the From header listed the user's
name but with the mailing list's address (just like it does now), and the
Reply-To header just listed the mailing list's address (whereas now, it
lists the mailing list's e-mail address _and_ the poster's e-mail address).
So, prior to the last update that Brad did, I don't think that the poster's
e-mail address was available anywhere in messages from the mailing list.

However, if I look at messages from several years ago, it used to be that
the From field listed the poster's name and e-mail address (not the mailing
lists's), and the Reply-To header listed the mailing list's address.

So, if we want to try to hide the poster's e-mail address, the behavior that
mailman had a few months ago would be best, whereas if we want that
information to be available, then it's behavior from several years ago would
be best. Either way, having Reply-To include the poster's e-mail address is
going to result in a lot of unnecessary e-mails going directly to folks in
addition to the mailing list.

- Jonathan M Davis