Hi all, I wanted to clarify the behavior of M when replying to a message.
In the process, I managed to find a bug, decribed below. And as I'm not
sure this behavior is described in the documentation, I thought maybe I
should send this, so that it could be included somewhere.
The 'Reply' case is quite simple: if there is a 'Reply-To' header, it is
used as the recipient addresse(s), otherwise 'From' is used.
One is in the 'Reply to sender' case when one explicitely chooses this
option in the menu. If not, this means that 'sender' is the default
reply kind configured, and M behaves as above. I would rename 'Reply to
sender' to 'Reply to originator', to avoid the misleading name of the
'Sender' header that is actually never used). The idea is to use 'From'
instead of 'Reply-To' as the recipient address. This feature was
obviously developped to deal with 'Reply-To-munging' lists. Currently,
there is a bug if one explicitely chooses this option in the menu,
because the address is actually not added to the composer (removing
lines 671 and 672 in MailFolder.cpp seems to correct the problem).
The 'Reply to list' feature tries to find to which mailing-list(s) this
message was sent. If there is no known list, it complains (if 'Reply to
list' was not the default kind of reply) and replies to all the
addresses ('From', 'Reply-To', 'To' and 'Cc').
'Reply to all' replies to 'From', 'Reply-To', 'To' and 'Cc'.
The change I wanted to propose is that 'From' should not be used if
'Reply-To' is present. It should always be disabled when entering the
composer (but not removed).
1. The 'Reply-To' may have been set by the originator of the mail, in
which case it is obvious that he does not want a reply to go to the
'From' address (or he would not have created this header in the first
place).
2. If the 'Reply-To' has been (wrongly) set by a mailing-list, and one
wants to reply to both the sender *and* the list (because the sender
is not subscribed), one can reset the 'None' to 'To' or 'Cc' for the
address of the sender.
Case 2. may be more common than case 1., but is not compliant with
section 3.6.3 of RFC2822, and is itself only necessary because of
reply-to-munging lists.
If the 'From' address is disabled but not removed, the (slight) burden
will be on non-compliant cases, rather than compliant ones. Isn't that
better?
--
Xavier Nodet
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
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