Data Circle

Being the hardcore geek that I am, I use the mutt email client to check my main email account. Whilst mutt is by far and away the best client I’ve used—its threading support blows the competition out of the water for a start—one thing has always bugged me. I’m subscribed to lots of mailing lists, some of which set the Reply-To header to be that used by the original poster, rather than replacing it with the list address. There are sound reasons for doing this, but as a user I have then have two options:

1. Hit ‘r’ to reply, then remember to replace the sender’s email address with that of the list (assuming I want to reply on-list), which is a bit clumsy and easy to forget.
2. Hit ‘g’ to reply, and email the original sender whilst copying in the list address, which creates two copies of the mail for the original poster (assuming he is subscribed to the list). This annoys a lot of people, including myself.

Neither of these options is ideal—what I want is the ability to reply to the list address in all circumstances, simply by pressing a single key. Thankfully, today I found out that there is a simple way to do this, which is to add each mailing list to my ~/.muttrc like so:

subscribe man-lug@lists.manchester.ac.uk linux-users@lists.manchester.ac.uk

If you’ve got several lists on one domain, as I have, you can simply use:

subscribe @lists.manchester.ac.uk @lists.evolt.org

Now whenever a post comes in from one of these lists, it gets marked with an ‘L’ (which is not too important, as all of my lists are filtered into individual folders anyway). If I want to reply to any post, I can use ‘L’ and mutt will automatically put the list address in the To: field, and I can still use ‘r’ to reply off-list to the original poster if I so desire. Problem solved!