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

[Mihai T. Lazarescu]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 12:29 AM Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> 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

I disagree on "recommends".  Actually "may", as modal verb, is used to
express *possibility* or used to ask or give *permission* (or is used
to make a *suggestion* or suggest a *possibility* in a polite way):
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/may

Either way, in the RFC it expresses an option, an acceptable alternate
behavior to the (implicit, because it's obvious) behavior, which is to
preserve the distinction between Cc: and To:. Distinction which, BTW,
the same RFC states beyond doubt (see the relevant quote in my
previous message in thread).

So, that "MAY" above just allows the MUA to *optionally* blur the
original assignment of recipients between To: and Cc:.  Not to enforce
a reassignment instead of the normal behaviour.

Beyond this, the fact that someone *should* change mutt is a
completely different discussion.  mutt is free as in "beer" and as in
"chage it yourself", and I completely respect that.

Mihai

P.S. FWIW, Thunderbird changed to preserve original assignment some
5-6 years ago.