Date:Fri, 11 Sep 2020 15:59:26 +0100
From:"Geoff Clare via austin-group-l at The Open Group"
Message-ID: <20200911145926.GA7856@localhost>
| Although Andrew asked us to take this to the offtopic list, I would
| like instead to bring it back on topic, by making it about mailx.
I will reply (mostly) in kind...
| 1. Using "sender" incorrectly implies that if a "Sender:" header field
| is present it should be used instead of "From:".
I would assume that it was using "sender" more generically, rather than
referring to a specific field, but it certainly could be clarified.
| 2. If the person replying is one of the "recipients included in the
| header of the message", this text requires that the reply message is
| sent to them, contradicting text elsewhere which says that this should
| only be done if the metoo variable is set.
That should be fixed. Probably by something like "Whether the reply
sender's address is included, when it would seem to be required, or
not to be added, depends upon ..."
| 3. It requires that "Reply-To:" is ignored.
As should that, though Reply-To is regarded as an originator field, and
could be (part of) the "sender" as wrong as that is. The issue here
really seems to be that "all recipients included in the header of the message"
doesn't include the (generic) sender (who isn't necessarily a recipient,
though can be) - and obviously should.
| It does not contain an explicit statement either way, so your
| interpretation and mine are both possible.
You're looking at it backwards, concentrating upon how replies are
supposed to be generated (which isn't really specified at all, other
than that comment about where a reply SHOULD be sent if there is no
Reply-To field present).
The IETF don't care about that, that's not an interoperability issue,
software can do whatever it likes, what matters is the interpretation of
the fields, so one knows what they're for, and what data is appropriate
to be included. For that, what's in the RFC is exactly right, Reply-To
indicates the address(es) to which the author of the message containing
it requests that recipients send replies.
What the recipients do with it is up to them, what their MUA offers them
as the default "reply" address list, and/or how much it permits modifications
are all just quality of implementation issues.
Here (the Austin List), however, what the (standard) MUA does with the
various command it has - that is, what the users can rely upon happening,
is an appropriate topic.
| rfc2822 itself says much the same thing later on. In 3.6.3 after it
| describes how the destination fields should be set when creating a
| reply, it says this:
|
| Note: Some mail applications have automatic reply commands that
| include the destination addresses of the original message in the
| destination addresses of the reply. How those reply commands behave
| is implementation dependent and is beyond the scope of this document.
Exactly, what MUAs do with things is not the IETF's bailiwick.
| In particular, whether or not to include the original destination
| addresses when the original message had a "Reply-To:" field is not
| addressed here.
As that is a quality of implementation issue.
Note that my original postscript on the message about issue 1138, where I
mentioned this issue, wasn't about how any MUA handles any mail header fields,
when generating replies, it was about how the mailing list generates
a Reply-To (and mangles the From) field where that Reply-To field is not
indicating the sender's desires as to where replies should be sent. That
is the problem I was pointing out, not what any particular MUA might do
with it.
| Let that be an end to the discussion of how "Reply-To:" is (or was
| originally) intended to be used and whether various email clients
| are right or wrong to handle it the way they do.
WRT the latter, yes, please, because there is no answer to that. But if
you're going to discuss what the mailx (or Mail, or whatever POSIX calls it)
command does by default with its "r" and "R" commands, then the first
part of that might not be possible, as what Reply-To means has to be an
issue when deciding how and when it should be used.
| All that matters for fixing the mailx description is what existing
| mailx implementations do.
agreed.
| Of the ones I tried, with "r":
|
| Solaris uses "Reply-To:" to replace just "From:"
| (although it has "R" and "r" the wrong way round!)
The original BSD "Mail" did it that way, I have no idea when they
swapped cases, that is 'r' was a "small" reply, and "R" a "big" reply...
But almost everyone uses "big" replies all the time, replying only to
the author is a less common thing to do, and R is harder to type than r,
so I guess somewhere along the way, someone switched them.
| S-nail uses "Reply-To:" to replace just "From:" (although, unlike the
| others,
