Ken Kobayashi <[email hidden]> wrote in :"]news:[email hidden]:
Quoted message said:John Rooker said:Valleybikes put all the mailing list addresses on a listserve so when you replied to the message,
it is sent to everyone subscribed to that list.
Incidentally, this is why mailing list servers shouldn't be configured to put the list address on
the "From" or "Reply-to" header. If you do, people try to reply to the sender and end up sending
the reply to the entire list. IHPVA lists are configured correctly so if you want to reply to the
entire list, you need to select "Reply to all" instead of "Reply".
Neh. Technically, "From" should be the original sender of the message, and "Reply-to" should be the
list address. Your mail reader should _ask_ you which you want to send it to if they are different;
of course Microshaft assumes it knows what you want to do and picks for you. in this case, Eudora
does the same. I use Pegasus mail at home, and it gives me a dialog when I reply to a message with
all sorts of nifty options; from work I telent into my account and use Pine, which asks "do you want
to use the reply-to address instead?" when there's a reply-to in the message.
If the mail clients were written properly, it wouldn't be a problem and people wouldn't have to
guess what the list address is.
Besides, the presence of a reply-to set to the list address isn't the point here. This would have
happened even if the originating list were one at IHPVA. The point here is that he sent a message to
the list to inform them that someone had a virus, and the message then got forwarded to multiple
other addresses. The person who is infected has all those other addresses in his address book, and
the virus resent itself to them randomly and automatically. His message was sent to the list on
purpose, not by accident, and the only way to have prevented the forwarded versions is if the
infected computer didn't have any addresses in its address book.
-Bill Hamilton
