[Mutt] Re: Group reply To-vs-Cc recipients

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 05:31:28PM +1100, Erik Christiansen wrote:
> Thread comment: It's OK to be unaware of the usefulness of RFC features,
> but it does seem odd to pretend that they're not useful just because
> it's only others who need them.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but for the sake of
clarity about RFC features, here's what RFC 2822 says on the matter
(3.6.3, paragraph 6):

   When a message is a reply to another message, the mailboxes of the
   authors of the original message (the mailboxes in the "From:"
   field) or mailboxes specified in the "Reply-To:" field (if it
   exists) MAY appear in the "To:" field of the reply since these
   would normally be the primary recipients of the reply.  If a reply
   is sent to a message that has destination fields, it is often
   desirable to send a copy of the reply to all of the recipients of
   the message, in addition to the author.  When such a reply is
   formed, addresses in the "To:" and "Cc:" fields of the original
   message MAY appear in the "Cc:" field of the reply, since these are
   normally secondary recipients of the reply.

It recomments Mutt's current behavior, for precisely the reasons I
gave in support of it.  The person who opened the ticket stated that
the expected behavior is for the recipients in the To: field to be
preserved, but the RFC clearly states otherwise.

Also FWIW, I've been a member of the Mutt community since about 1996,
and this is the first time I remember anyone ever bringing it up.  If
it's happened before, it certainly has never been a hot issue.  22
years of virtually no one complaining does not exactly scream that it
needs attention...  Given that, I think the benefit of making this
configurable is not worth the risk of introducing a new bug that comes
with every change and with every increase in code complexity.

That said, in this case I imagine the required change is probably
small enough and simple enough that it's not a very interesting
consideration either way.  Still, Mutt is such a beast to configure as
it is, with so many configuration options, by default I lean heavily
against adding more options unless it can be shown that there's
significant benefit.  I think the available information suggest that
there is not.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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