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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>