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

Derek Martin invalid at pizzashack.org
Fri Dec 14 20:07:54 UTC 2018


On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 03:20:57PM +0100, Mihai Lazarescu wrote:
> On Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 17:56:51 -0600, Derek Martin wrote:
> 
> >The majority of the community said nothing at all, which
> >suggests (as I suggested) that most people don't actually give
> >a $#@! about this, as well they shouldn't. I'll note that in
> >response to Kevin's query, two people (Ariis and Christiansen)
> >said preserving the To: line was sensible, and three people
> >(Zimmerman, Yardley, and myself) said it seems pointless.
> >There were no other opinions provided.
> 
> For some posters here I probably don't fit in the "people" category,
> since I made clear that both behaviours make very much sense and the
> user, not MUA, should decide which and where to use.

No, sorry, this was simply oversight on my part.

> First reason, by design mutt has little appeal where the To:/Cc:
> distinction is likely to matter, i.e., organizations with layered
> structures.  That's because such structures:

I think this idea is a mistake.  I use Mutt in just such a corporate
environment and it does not hinder me in any way.  And FWIW, for the
nearly 15 years I've worked here, absolutely no one has come begging
me to change the way I address my messages.  It's largely pointless to
care about this since users WILL NOT follow it uniformly, and once the
convention is broken on your thread, it's permanently broken, since
the overwhelming majority of users simply won't care enough to even
notice.

Besides, if you're in the camp that says that USUALLY the respondent
is the primary recipient, but SOMETIMES it isn't, what do you want
Mutt to do here?  Ask you every time?  That seems tedious and
cumbersome.

The fact is, at the time the RFC was published, nearly all clients
behaved like Mutt does today (including Netscape Mail--Thunderbird
didn't exist yet).  Outlook was--as usual--the largest exception, but
Outlook has always done things wrong.  [Curiously, Exchange web client
currently does work like Mutt.]  I can't say for sure why the author
decided to buck the trend and go soft on this, but I can guess:  He
worked for Qualcomm (they're named on the RFC), who published Eudora.
Probably they thought it should be done the other way--most likely to
be compatible with Outlook--but had to acknowledge that everyone else
in the world did it the way Mutt does when they wrote the RFC.  Eudora
died in 2006, and Qualcomm turned its focus to a client based on
Thunderbird.  Then, assuming my theory is correct, it's not a big
surprise that Thunderbird eventually adopted this approach.  Most
likely the Eudora developers would have moved to the Thunderbird team
after Eudora's final demise, and brought with them their various ideas
and prejudices.

RFCs are not always free of corporate agenda, and the late 90's and
early 2000's were a time when that was especially rampant, though
Microsoft was the usual culprit.

> Second reason, mutt project seems to be very conservative. Hence, if
> something is not proven to be clearly broken (the code or the
> reasoning behind it), then it is very unlikely to "outweigh the
> risks" of most potential changes.

This is not nearly as true as it used to be.  Kevin, and Brendan
before him, have done (I think) a good job at balancing progress 
vs. change risk.  He may still make a change here, and he's well
within his right to do so.

As a final note, the bug poster has actually agreed with me and
requested the bug be closed.

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