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: Derek Martin <code@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: bug-any@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc:
Subject: Re: mutt/2304: reply / group reply behavior broken WRT $reply_to and
$reply_self
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 21:32:46 -0400
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On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 05:35:02PM +0200, Derek Martin wrote:
> > More precisely, mutt will not honor a reply-to header when
> > replying to messages written by oneself unless reply_self is
> > set.
Actually this is not correct. If you only reply to such a message,
Mutt will not honor the Reply-to header, no matter how $reply_to and
$reply_self are set.
If reply_to is set, but reply_self is unset, Mutt will reply to the
recipients of the original mail. This makes perfect sense if reply_to
is not set, but doesn't make sense if it is set. Currently, this is
what you get regardless of reply_to.
If reply_to is set, and reply_self is set, Mutt will reply to the
sender's address given in the From: header. Again, if only reply_self
is set, this makes perfect sense (and is what you get). If you have
both set, the intuitive behavior is for mutt to address the mail to
both. But it does not do that, and there is currently no way to make
it do that.
In NO case will mutt honor the Reply-to header (for regular reply).
Thus in this case, reply_to is useless. It is totally disregarded.
This seems obviously broken to me.
For group replies, mutt also disregards Reply-to when reply-self is
not set. It should disregard Reply-to when reply_to is not set, as it
does. But it should not disregard Reply-to when reply_to is set.
How is this not obvious?
> > 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.
>
> NO NO NO NO NO! You keep saying that, but I can not emphasize enough
> that reply-to IS NOT an address which is the sender. It is not
> described that way in the Mutt manual, nor is it described that way in
> the RFCs. In fact, RFC 822 specifically states:
>
> The "Reply-To" field is added by the originator and serves to
> direct replies, whereas the "Return-Path" field is used to
> identify a path back to the originator.
Perhaps you need a detailed example to be convincd, so here's an
extremely plausible and sensible one, which I have personally seen
used.
Today, you work for XYZ company as a sales rep, customer rep, or
support engineer. You have specific customers assigned to you.
Your customers generally know that you are their representative, and
mail you directly. Most likely there is no mechanism in place at
your company for automatically delegating e-mail to a generic acount
to the right people. This tends to be true at small, young,
disorganized companies (of which there are many).
Now, you've just found out you're being promoted, or maybe you have
decided to leave XYZ company, and your customers will be serviced by
John Smith starting today, but you will have some transition period
during which you will stay in your current job, to give them a
chance to be notified of their new representative, pass of relevant
details about your accounts to John Smith, etc. In the mean time,
naturally you continue to receive requests from your customers.
Since you are transitioning, you want all new requests from your
customers to immediately go to John Smith. You can't simply forward
all your mail to John Smith, because you still need to be able to
get mail that is actually intended for you. In response to your
customers' requests, you quite sensibly set a Reply-to: header to
jsmith@xxxxxxx, and include a block of text in all your e-mails to
let the customer know that they should now be sending requests to
John Smith.
A few minutes later, you remember some salient details related to
this request from the customer. So you reply to your own message...
So the obvious question is, where should this reply go?
The obvious answer is, almost certainly to John Smith, and almost
certainly not to yourself. You don't care about this account
anymore, as it belongs to John Smith now. Even if the details are
meant for the customer, he will need to be kept aprised of any
communication between you and the customer during the transition
period. So you certainly want him on the e-mail, just as you intended
when you set the Reply-to header. If you really do want to send mail
to yourself as some kind of reminder, that would be the exception to
the rule in this case, and you could either manually edit the from
line, or unset reply_to.
Very possibly, you are replying separately, because you DON'T want the
customer to see your comments. You might want to tell John something
like, "This customer has been a real pain to deal with lately..." So
you want mutt to honor your Reply-to header, and send only to John
Smith. But currently with mutt, this behavior is IMPOSSIBLE, despite
the fact that you have told mutt you want it to honor Reply-to
headers. This makes absolutely NO SENSE. In order to get this
behavior, you will need to reply and edit the from headers.
Imagine having to do that 100 times a day, for every request that
comes in to you while you are in your transition period at XYZ
corp.!!! That would get very frustrating. Especially after reading
and re-reading the Mutt manual, seeing that reply_to is set, and not
being able to understand why Mutt is ignoring your Reply-to header.
If by chance you only wanted to send the mail to the customer, which
seems extremely unlikely, you get that behavior (both with existing
mut and with my patch) by unsetting reply_to.
If you want the comments to go to both John and the customer,
currently you can only get that behavior by setting both reply_to and
reply_self, and doing a group reply. But this has the undesireable
effect of addressing the message to yourself, and CCing everyone else,
so you get a copy of the message, which you don't want. What you
wanted was to set reply_to, but not reply_self, and group-reply, so
that John (listed in the Reply-to header) and the customers will get
the e-mail, but you won't. But if you do that, only the customer will
get the e-mail, not John. There's no way to tell mutt to do this
either, despite the fact that the mechanism exists in Mutt, because
the mechanism is broken.
Please apply my patch.
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