Allan Hansen writes:
> I have set the ReplyTo: as the author, it’s not the immediate
> replying as such that is an issue, and the mangled string is
> factually correct. The issue comes when Apple Mail does
> auto-completion and hides the email address.
>
> A mangled From: address like this:
>
> "Allan Hansen (han...@rc.org <mailto:han...@rc.org>) via list"
> <r...@mail.rc.org <mailto:r...@mail.rc.org>>
That's not our mangling, it's your client's. Ours would look like
this:
"Allan Hansen (han...@rc.org) via list" <r...@mail.rc.org>
Most likely, the client actually uses the Mailman version in composing
replies but displays the above to you (or presents it to the system
highlight-and-copy function).
> will show up as
>
> ‘Allan Hansen (han...@rc.org <mailto:han...@rc.org>) via list’
>
> in Apple Mail with the address hidden by the mail client. Anyone
> sending to that string will assume that it goes to me. It does
> not. It goes to the list.
I don't contest your statement of fact, but if Reply-To indeed
contains author, it should go to author. (I believe we *always* add
author to Reply-To if Munge From is in effect.) If it doesn't go to
Reply-To, the client is at fault, because if Reply-To is set, it is
the *author*'s preferred address for receiving replies, and From
*should* be ignored in collecting the addressees to use in replies.
(It's possible that it *also* goes to the list, if the list is in
Reply-To or the user requests "reply to all".)
Bottom line: I'll do what I can to help you, but I'm not sure whatever
it is we come up with is suitable for adding to the main Mailman
distribution.
> On the other hand, if this is the case, it appears that the
> automatically inserted message footer added by Mailman is working
> fine (see next). Would anything prevent adding to this section?
No.
> Can it be a REPLY button?
No. I'm pretty sure the footer is plain text (see below) and plain
text can't specify buttons. The *client* can add them as easily as it
can turn addresses in text into clickable links.
The problem is that the From (if no Reply-To) and Reply-To (preferred
if present) header fields are the only reliable ways to inform the
client that a given address is the author's preferred reply address.
In other words, if it ain't working, it's broke beyond what we can do
to fix. We can maybe help or workaround, but no promises, because
anything we do will require cooperation from your subscribers to be
effective. We can help make the RightThang[tm] easier to discover,
but the proverb about horses and water applies.
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Allan's mailing list
> al...@mail.rc.org <mailto:al...@mail.rc.org>
> <http://mail.rc.org/mailman/listinfo/allan
> <http://mail.rc.org/mailman/listinfo/allan>>
I don't know what your client is so I can't be sure, but the line of
hyphens suggests that the footer is added as a text/plain part, not
text/html. In any case, Mailman presents the addresses as text, not
as links, so it must be something the client is doing.
It turns out to be easy for software to recognize URLs in text, so
most clients do so and turn them into links automatically, even though
Mailman doesn't. I'm pretty sure that this works fine in almost all
clients. When it doesn't, it's normally an easy copy-paste. Adding a
mailto URL to list in the footer can be done, it's just a matter of
editing a template. (I don't think that editing can be done in
Postorius (the admin on the web module) yet, but I believe it's on the
todo list.)
Adding a mailto URL to author probably requires a feature we don't
have yet (I don't think the author's address is made available to the
footer generation function.) I will look into that. Again, even with
this feature you would have to customize in the footer template. It
will not be a default behavior of Mailman.
> I did the code change for the mangling long ago, on advice from
> this list. It worked for a while, until the auto-completion issue
> and hiding of the actual email addresses messed it up. I’d rather
> not have the same problems in Mailman 3, so I’m looking for
> something, anything - even if it’s not nice, that does not cause my
> subscribers to be confused or to send private messages to 1000
> people without knowing it.
Without seeing a full header of a message as distributed by your list,
I can't be sure. But if the settings are as you say and the From and
Reply-To headers are set as I expect they are, there is no sure way to
prevent misaddressed mail except to change clients, because the
clients that reply to From in the presence of a Reply-To field are
just plain broken. The list cannot work around them without risking
breaking other clients, where those other clients *are* conforming to
Internet standards.
Alternatively, you could ban posts by @yahoo.com and @aol.com
addresses, in which case most of the need to munge from goes away.
But neither of those is likely to make your subscribers happy. People
hate changing their mail clients and mail addresses more than anything
else in computing, it seems. I can't really blame them about hating
to change address, for sure, and I don't know of any mail clients that
make it simple to change to a different one. There are always some
data that you depend on that have to be extracted from the previous
client per https://xkcd.com/538/ ;-).
BTW, I have not used EMWD myself, but Brian is a good citizen on the
list, and he does due diligence on this list in terms of asking us to
help with solving problems for his clients. EMWD is top of my list if
I ever decide to delegate my list or servers to a commercial service.
Steve
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