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

[Mihai Lazarescu]

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.

That being said, it's obvious that a +1 does not change 
meaningfully any stats or decisions.

Even more, considering mutt design objectives and project 
evolution, IMO this whole discussion was and is pointless after 
the first few fact-finding messages, for two major reasons.

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:

1. tend to have a non-mutt IT-supported (or even -enforced) MUA;

2. tend to exchange messages with HTML formatting and/or 
embedded images, for which mutt, by definition, does not excel.

Instead, where the organizational layers are blurred or absent, 
people tend to discard also the distinctions To:/Cc: and even 
prevalently use unadorned text too communicate.

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.

That reminds me of TeX: 
http://www.tug.org/tetex/html/texfaq/faq_1.html#QU13 which 
I very much appreciate, too (the program, not decision). 
Unlike TeX, mutt has much limited extension support, but is 
forked with lots of additions.

For those interested, the original To:/Cc: distribution can 
be semi-automatically preserved: copy-paste the To:/Cc: fields 
of the incoming message from viewer in place of the whole Cc: 
field and its list in the editor (I assume edit_headers=yes). 
The resulting two To: fields are automatically merged when 
quitting the editor.

Cheers,
Mihai