Geoff Clare wrote in
<20200914090031.GB11999@localhost>:
|Robert Elz wrote, on 12 Sep 2020:
|>
|> How you can manage to reconcile this in the standard, more precisely
|> that saying "the r and R commands reply to the current message, using
|> different, but otherwise unspecified, addresses obtained from the header
|> of the current message" (in better prose than that, one would hope), I
|> don't know, and that's not very useful to anyone.
|
|Perhaps one way forward would be to require that mailx can be
|configured so that "R" and "r" behave in a particular way, but that
|it need not be the default configuration.
|
|While reading through the various responses, I also realised that
|there is a fourth problem to add to the list I originally gave.
|(I forget who's response made me think of it, but for convenience
|I'll just put the details here. Apologies for not giving credit
|where due.)
|
|As stated before, the description of "r" says the reply is sent
|to "all recipients included in the header of the message". The
|fourth problem is:
|
|4. "r" is required NOT to send the reply to the author/sender of the
|message, but only to its (known) recipients. (So the author/sender
|will only get the reply if they were included in "To:" or "Cc:".)
An editorial error that reveals deficits in they way human brains
scan text. That is what i thought first. (I never recognized
this "oddity".)
On a second glance this could be thirty and more years old, as
Tenth Edition Research Unix (1991; i think in effect this was UPAS
then, i would presume? It also has a V9 preprocessor block which
uses "UPAS-envelopes", Fromname()) and 3BSD Mail (March 1980; not
newer ones!) did not look out for the From: (let alone Sender:) at
all, like (showing BSD because of further comments below)
if ((replyto = skin(hfield("reply-to", mp))) != NOSTR)
np = extract(replyto, GTO);
else if ((cp = skin(hfield("to", mp))) != NOSTR)
np = extract(cp, GTO);
else
np = NIL;
BSD Mail 8.1 (.. .1, anyhow from 1996-06-14) then prepends
if ((rcv = skin(hfield("from", mp))) == NOSTR)
rcv = skin(nameof(mp, 1));
to the above and then does a dance
... remove all alternates etc. from "np" ....
if (np != NIL && replyto == NOSTR)
if anything real to address remains and we did not see Reply-To:
np = cat(np, extract(rcv, GTO));
also address From:
else if (np == NIL) {
if (replyto != NOSTR)
printf("Empty reply-to field -- replying to author\n");
np = extract(rcv, GTO);
only address From:
}
head.h_to = np;
This is of course very primitive handling and does not take care
for RFC 2822, no Sender: handling, etc.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
