Re: Mutt group reply

[Felix Fietkau <nbd@openwrt.org>]

On 2014-07-15 17:12, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 09:27:09AM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
>> On 07/13/14 22:51, Rich Felker wrote:
>> > On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 12:58:59AM +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
>> >> On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 07:59:04PM +0100, Laurent Bercot wrote:
>> >>> On 13/07/2014 17:34, Solar Designer wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> An alternative is to reconfigure the list so that it doesn't set the
>> >>>> Reply-To header, but this may result in many replies being inadvertently
>> >>>> sent off-list.  I think it's better for Mutt users to adopt a habit to
>> >>>> answer that question with "n".
>> > 
>> > Thanks! I had been looking for a solution to this issue for a long
>> > time but didn't bother to really look into it.
>> 
>> Thunderbird's "reply all" will _only_ reply to the reply-to, and I wind
>> up manually copying in individual email addresses to cc: when I bother.
>> (Yes, it has a 'reply list' button, but the reply-to header overrides
>> the difference.)
> 
> Reply-to headers should not override the 'reply to all' feature in a
> mail client. If they do, this is a bug. What use is 'reply to all' if
> it behaves the same as plain 'reply'?
Thunderbird isn't the only Mail client that's affected. As far as I
know, Apple Mail and GMail are affected in pretty much the same way.

>> So it breaks other mail clients too. Largely because reply-to seems to
>> be used so seldom, and thus isn't particularly debugged. (This is the
>> only list I've followed in the past 5 years at least that uses reply-to.)
> 
> In lists I've been active on, I've seen both approaches. oss-security
> and all the mplayer and ffmpeg lists are other examples that use(d)
> Reply-to. Busybox and uclibc and libc-alpha (glibc) are some that
> don't. I can use both (especially now that I found a good solution for
> avoiding messing up replies myself) but I pretty strongly prefer the
> use of Reply-to, because it tends to avoid having people accidentally
> reply off-list and losing the continuity of threads on the list. And
> since it's easy to detect Reply-to generated by the list (e.g. just
> look for the To and Reply-to addresses matching), any good client
> should be able to override this default for power users who really
> want to override it.
I consider lists using Reply-To to be badly broken. Is it really worth
breaking often used regular features (like either replying directly to
the author, or reply-all) with several popular mail clients, just for
the sake of preventing a few accidental off-list emails from people who
click the wrong button? I don't think so.

I think this is spot on: http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

- Felix