Modifying Reply-To Headers

1.  Using procmail

Introduction

This document is written on request of many Gentoo developers to cover how to modify the Reply-To header in an email for consistency across all of the Gentoo mailing lists. For reasons not mentioned here, there is an inconsistency between the gentoo-core private mailing list, and the rest of the Gentoo mailing lists.

Removing Reply-To

Users who have a MUA that supports a Reply-To-List function will likely want to remove the munged Reply-To headers. This allows them to use their mail client how it was intended, with the Reply button replying to the Author. If your mail client has a Reply-To-List function, you can use the following recipe snippet in your .procmailrc file to remove the Reply-To headers.

# This removes those Reply-To: headers
:0 fhw
* ^List-Id:.*gentoo.org.
| formail -I "Reply-To:"

This scans the message headers for any Gentoo list and removes any Reply-To header that it finds.

Adding Reply-To

Some of the most popular mail clients in use do not support a Reply-To-List function. This causes problems for the users of these clients and has resulted in Reply-To munging being used to reduce complexity for these users. Since only the gentoo-core mailing list does not use Reply-To munging, the following rule only touches that list.

# This adds a Reply-To: header
:0 fhw
* ^List-Id:.*gentoo-core\.gentoo\.org
|formail -I "Reply-To: gentoo-core@lists.gentoo.org"

This scans for the gentoo-core list and adds a Reply-To header pointing to the list.

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