Mailing lists have been with us since the earliest years of the Internet. Thanks to the universality of email, they remain one of the easiest and most inclusive methods to communicate with groups of people online.
But so long as mailing lists have existed, so has the debate about whether the Reply-To field of a message sent via a mailing list should point to the original sender, or back to the entire list. The technical term for this is “Reply-To munging”, a wonderfully esoteric term whose roots date back to the late 50’s, and over the years numerous impassioned arguments have been made against it, for it, and against it yet again. While no formal survey has been taken, the Internet seems pretty evenly divided here.
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve solved this problem once and for all. In Threadable, Reply-To munging can be enabled or disabled on a per user basis, rather than at the list level. Now that we've built it, it's clear that this should have been a user-level preference all along.
This is made possible by the unique way Threadable handles email. Rather than acting like a simple reflector, sending out identical messages to every list member, Threadable individually constructs unique outgoing messages for each recipient. This gives us the ability to deliver messages to users in a highly personalized manner, of which customizable Reply-To munging is only the beginning.