On Friday, September 28 at 12:59 PM, quoth Ian Collier:
Apologies if this is a mutt-users issue, but it looks like mutt is being inconsistent in how it determines whether a message came from a mailing list.
Mmmm, not exactly. It is somewhat inconsistent, but it is documented.
A particular email has the headers attached below. If I start mutt (with no rc file just to make things consistent: "mutt -n -F /dev/null") then it already knows in some sense that this belongs to a mailing list because if I press capital-L then it offers to send the reply to rexxla-members@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Right, because the message has a List-Post header, and (IIRC) that's what the command <list-reply> uses.
However, the message does not match the pattern "~l".
Because ~l (as described by the documentation) matches only messages addressed to mailing lists that have been declared by either a "subscribe" or "list" command.
The problem is that if I now make an rc file containing the command "subscribe rexxla-members" then the message *still* does not match the pattern "~l".
Take note of what the documentation says. ~l only matches messages ADDRESSED TO mailing lists that have been defined by the user. This message that you attached is *addressed to* members@xxxxxxxxxx, and thus rexxla-members will not match it.
The even worse problem is that if I add the command "subscribe members@" then the list-reply command will now offer to send my replies to "rexxla-members@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, members@xxxxxxxxxx" which is bad because they are aliases of the same list and everyone gets duplicate copies.
How is mutt supposed to know that those are the same list? When you list-reply, for all mutt knows, members@xxxxxxxxxx is an entirely different list that wishes to be CC'd on all replies to the mailing list. Not only that, but your mailing list is mangling the message headers in a conflicting way: the List-Post header specifies that to contact the list you must use rexxla-members@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, and yet Reply-To specifies that replies must go to members@xxxxxxxxxxx What mutt is doing, given what this message's headers are telling it, seems entirely reasonable to me.
Is there any way to fix this?
Lots of ways. The easiest is probably to set $ignore_list_reply_to. (I *think* that should make mutt do what you want.)
You should probably ask that mailing list to change their setup so that it is consistent and uses the same email address for everything. That would also fix it.
You could also, depending on how you receive mail, set up a procmail script to re-mangle the Reply-To header to match the List-Post header.
There are probably other methods, but that's what springs to mind. ~Kyle --I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.
-- Woody Allen
Attachment:
pgpFimOGiVl44.pgp
Description: PGP signature