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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: 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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