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

Erik Christiansen dvalin at internode.on.net
Tue Dec 11 09:39:31 UTC 2018


On 10.12.18 17:29, Derek Martin wrote:
> 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.

It clearly states that it "MAY" be otherwise. There will doubtless be
use cases where that is fully acceptable, and cases where it can be
tolerated. It does, though, seem a pity to arbitrarily munge the user's
recipient preferences, rather than preserve them. It does seem to
violate POLA.

Erik


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