Re: mutt/2304: reply / group reply behavior broken WRT $reply_to and $reply_self
The following reply was made to PR mutt/2304; it has been noted by GNATS.
From: Thomas Roessler <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: bug-any@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc:
Subject: Re: mutt/2304: reply / group reply behavior broken WRT $reply_to and
$reply_self
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 11:34:36 -0400
On 2006-07-15 14:15:02 +0200, Derek Martin wrote:
>> Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way, but the
>> behavior that you describe sounds logical to me: If I
>> send a mail, and set a reply_to header, then that is an
>> alternative address for myself. So, if $reply_self is
>> unset, mutt should ignore it.
> I take it you remain unconvinced about this?
Actually, I hadn't gotten around to looking into it again after
your last response. I had mised the point that the problem
really only occurs when a message is addressed to oneself in
the To field.
So let's see...
> If I can summarize very succinctly, the problem is this:
> 1. The point of $reply_to is to tell mutt to either honor
> or not honor the Reply-to header.
More or less -- the actual logic is a bit more complex. e.g.,
reply-to is completely overridden upon group-reply to a message
with a mail-followup-to header, and some such.
> 2. Under the circumstances I previously described, Mutt
> will not honor the Reply-to header even when $reply_to is
> set, and in fact the recipient list will be identical in
> those cases, whether $reply_to is set or not set. This
> simply makes no sense.
More precisely, mutt will not honor a reply-to header when
replying to messages written by oneself unless reply_self is
set. The inference that's going on here is that the reply-to
header is an address that points to the message's sender, so if
the sender is removed from the recipient list, so is the
reply-to header. Strikes me as the right thing to do.
As you wrote in a previous note, when the message is also
addressed to oneself, what happens with a "normal" reply is
that the sender's own address actually *does* show up in the To
header, whether or not reply_self is activated. One could
argue that this is a bug, and that, either, reply-to should be
honored, or that any non-self addresses should be copied --
possibly falling back to the CC header if there is nothing in
the To header, or some such.
In any event, I'll admit that I don't have a good sense what
I'd expect mutt to do in this particular case -- probaby
because I've never even tried to do a non-group reply to a
message of the kind that exhibits the behavior that you
describe.
--
Thomas Roessler <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>