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I am working on a PHP based mailing list using PHPmailer.

Currently I have implemented two options for answers to mailing list posts: reply to sender only Vs reply to list. This basically controls which address is inserted in the Reply-To field.

I want to create the behaviour which my users know from Mailman, here an example:

SenderA posts a message:

From: senderA@foo.bar

To: list@foo.bar

The mailing list forwards it to all recipients, e.g. here to RecipientA:

From: senderA@foo.bar

To: recipientA@foo.bar

CC: list@foo.bar

Now RecipientA replies to the post and the reply looks like that:

From: recipientA@foo.bar

To: senderA@foo.bar

The other option RecipientA has is posting the reply to the whole mailing by choosing "reply to all" in the mail client which looks like that in the reply:

From: recipientA@foo.bar

To: senderA@foo.bar

CC: list@foo.bar

When I would decide to set the mailing list's address in the CC field for all forwarded mails:

  • Does that mean the mail comes back to the mailing list 100 times when I send out the mail to 100 subscribers (-> it would cost quite a lot of performance to retrieve, check and drop that duplicate mails)

  • Can I include a certain header so that the mail to the CC'd mailing list is not send 100 times? How can I tell the mail server(s) to not do that?

Or:

  • Is there an alternative way to allow the users to decide to reply to the sender or to the whole list?
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hbit
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  • As far as i know, in phpmailer, you can set reply-to ( http://www.askapache.com/php/phpfreaks-eric-rosebrocks-phpmailer-tutorial.html ): At the time this tutorial was written, here is a list of features currently available: Can send emails with multiple TOs, CCs, BCCs and REPLY-TOs – Catalin Dec 14 '10 at 17:35
  • That's right, that's what I am doing already. But there is nothing like a Reply-CC, which would be the perfect match. – hbit Dec 14 '10 at 18:55
  • You could simulate from the script that sends the email...add to reply-to only the cc addresses...make some kind of selector asking the user who should the recepient be able to reply to...eventually add a checkbox list with all the addresses so he can check who to add in reply-to... – Catalin Dec 15 '10 at 08:13
  • That doesn't solve the problem - I have no influence on the way the users see the mails -> the can use all sorts of mail clients The only way I see the user has a chance for doing this choice is by choosing reply Vs reply-to-all in his mail client. And that brings the problem that the mailing list account gets spammed with it's own mails. – hbit Dec 15 '10 at 17:12
  • What if I supply a header field Message-ID? From Wikipedia: "Message-ID: Also an automatically generated field; used to prevent multiple delivery and for reference in In-Reply-To [...]" When I supply the Message-ID in my program is it ensured that the mail sever does not create a new one? Does that prevent the target mail server from working 1000 times with the same message? – hbit Dec 16 '10 at 17:40

1 Answers1

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I figured it out - most email clients will treat replying to mailing list emails as desired when the following conditions are met for the outgoing mailing list emails:

  • The emails come with the standard mailing list headers according to RFC 2369, you definitely need List-Post with something like <mailto:list@foo.bar>
  • For replies only to the sender you either need a correct set From header field (must be the email of the sender, recipientA@foo.bar in the example) or the Reply-To header field in case you cannot change the From field

This is slightly different from the Mailman approach but it works very well and you can be sure that your server does not have to deal with unwanted duplicates

hbit
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