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  • 3 yrs 32 wks 3 days old
  • Updated: 11 Nov 2008
  • 70 entries
  • 136 comments
Tipical Charlie
Welcome to Tipical Charlie, a repository of all kinds of tips related to computing, from web developer and technologist, Charlie Arehart.
I'll mostly share my own tips that I've found others enjoyed hearing about. I'll welcome tips from others, too.
(Wondering where I came up with the name?)

Finding the email address of the sender of a message on a mailing list

posted Tuesday, 9 May 2006

I participate in a lot of mailing lists. Maybe you do, too. Have you ever seen a note where someone wanted to (or was asked to) reply directly to the sender of a message on the list, but when reading the message, they couldn't "see" the sender's email address (they see the address of the list instead), so they have to ask on the list for the sender to indicate their email address?


The sad thing is that there's a much simpler solution. Maybe you know it, and you can point people to this post when you want to share the solution. The problem isn't unique to any particular mailing list. People experience it on many of them.


The problem is that if you hit reply, most times you will see the "to" address being set to the address of the mailing list, not the sender of the email. (That's a good thing, as then your reply goes to everyone on the list, which is generally what's preferred.) Unfortunately (depending on your point of view) the body of the message showing what you're replying to may show the sender's name, but it generally doesn't show their email address. One benefit of this is that then if the mailing list is archived, the sender's email isn't as likely to be harvested by a spammer.


The simple solution, then, is to close the email before you reply and/or look at the message from the sender before you hit reply, and in most email clients you will readily be shown who the email is from, including their name and email address, which you can then easily copy/paste.


Of course, some people also put their email address in a "signature" that they show at the bottom of all their notes, which can help solve this more easily, but this is for when they do not. Hope it helps someone.

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