1.11 Mailing Lists

Sometimes while posting to mailing lists, the poster needs to direct followups to the post to specific places. The Mail-Followup-To (MFT) was created to enable just this. Three example scenarios where this is useful:

• A mailing list poster can use MFT to express that responses should be sent to just the list, and not the poster as well. This will happen if the poster is already subscribed to the list.

• A mailing list poster can use MFT to express that responses should be sent to the list and the poster as well. This will happen if the poster is not subscribed to the list.

• If a message is posted to several mailing lists, MFT may also be used to direct the following discussion to one list only, because discussions that are spread over several lists tend to be fragmented and very difficult to follow.

Gnus honors the MFT header in other's messages (i.e. while following up to someone else's post) and also provides support for generating sensible MFT headers for outgoing messages as well.