I am confused at the baseline request, and it seems like the thread is discussing *how* this should be implemented and not *whether* it should be. Huh?
On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 10:57 AM Alejandro Colomar via Mutt-dev < [email protected]> wrote: > When I forward a message, I want to have it threaded under the original > mail. To be overly cute, "It's nice to want things." What is the justification for this change? Is it for your personal benefit as the sender, or is for the perceived benefit of the recipients of your forwarded messages? Or something else? Is there any standards-based support for it? Is there any non-standards based real-world practice implemented by others that do this? It's not great for email clients to innovate in how they manage their interactions with the rest of the email ecosystem because many email users and clients have expectations in what they receive, and breaking those expectations can lead to pain and suffering. I know some people are against this (especially the In-Reply-To one, since > it's not a reply, technically). (I am troubled when we use the word "technically" in a discussion without specifying the technical basis being referred to, because I find it clouds the discussion and makes it vague what people's positions are. Do we mean "technically" in the RFC5322 sense? Do we agree that RFC5322 should govern what we do here?) But indeed, a forwarded email is absolutely not a reply, and that is arguably the whole point. Not a reply, should not be treated like a reply. It seems to me that this is the kind of feature that you can locally add to a programmatically controlled email client that can be configured with a scripting language like Lua or Elisp or Guile (or python), and then you could, I guess, publish that configuration/script so it would be available to others who share your preference. Except that, absent some justification not articulated, it seems like a *bad* feature — a *misfeature* — that more people should not be encouraged to do, because then people will start to misunderstand what a reply is and what a forwarded message is, and the blurring of that distinction seems like it leads to problems and broken privacy boundaries and the like. And of course, when we talk about a scriptable email client, that is not mutt. I hear neomutt supports Lua, which makes me wonder why that's not what you're pursuing. (Of course, you can bolt on your own features to mutt by scripting your editor or by changing mutt's C codebase or using wrapper scripts around sendmail/whatever and whatnot.) As for whether this should be always-on versus an option, it seems clear to me that it is wholly inappropriate as a mandatory behavior change (as Kevin says, "heresy") and arguably does not even belong as an optional feature. Or if it does, we haven't heard any explanation as to why…or I missed it entirely! -- [email protected] John Hawkinson +1 617 797 0250
