On Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 18:23:11 -0600, Derek Martin wrote:
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 09:51:08AM -0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 05:29:01PM -0600, Derek Martin wrote:
> > [...]since these are normally secondary recipients of the reply.
> >
> >It recomments Mutt's current behavior, for precisely the reasons I
> >gave in support of it.
>
> Okay, that's a good argument for keeping the default behavior as-is.
>
> But the "reason" supplied by the RFC, which I snipped to emphasize,
> is a bit weak.
I'm not sure why you think that. You, just now, responded to
something I said. Without the thing I said you have no purpose in
replying to the message. Therefore principally, inherently, it is me
that you are responding to... no one else said the thing you're
responding to, only me. I am the only principle recipient of your
message. Everyone else who is a recipient, inherently, you are just
keeping in the loop, because they may be interested in your follow-up
to my message. That's exactly the stated purpose of the Cc: line.
That is a fact, and it's a fact your mailer can easily deal with.
Both behaviours are useful, for distinct use cases. An example:
1. Incoming: manager-to-team members, with team members in To:
+ some recipients from aux services in Cc:.
Replies from team members very likely should have only the
manager in To: and the rest in Cc:.
2. Incoming: manager-to-managers all at same level and all in
To: + some aux recipients in Cc: (e.g., secretaries)
Replies from other managers should preserve the incoming
To:/Cc: distribution.
Technically, To: and Cc: deliver the message the same way.
So the RFC could have discarded Cc: altogether.
However, Cc: is there exactly because of the carbon-copy era
distinction between primary and secondary recipients, which
matters in some use cases.
If and when the Cc:/To: distinction matters and how the
recipients should be distributed between these fields is only
environment- and user-specific.
The RFC or other static rules cannot determine it universally.
That's why the RFC and other MUAs allow both behaviours.
Mihai
