Allegedly, on or about 09 July 2017, Stephen Morris sent:
Sorry, I wasn't referring to TB's reply functionality as
being a list
issue, I agree with you that the functionality implemented by TB is
stupid, and I'll see if I can post an issue on it on the post site
that was discussing all the plugin support issues in Firefox and
possibly TB that were originating with versions 52/53.
I'm wondering if that irritating behaviour can be bug reported as being
non-RFC compliant. Thunderbird's behaviour is a serious screw-up.
At least Evolution handles it better: Decides you appear to be replying
to a list, then asks you which way to reply. And gives you an option to
make that a permanent choice (though I've no idea whether there's a way
to unset that, later on).
People have been debating mailing list reply-to munging for years, but
this behaviour causes far more problems than it allegedly fixes. For
lists with a list reply address, the default reply should reply to that
address, and an extra non-standard reply option ought to be for
privately reply. For those peculiar lists that don't want public
replies to the list, they won't have a reply-to header, and none of this
nonsense is required.
For non-list mail, the reply-to should be adhered to, without stupidly
offering a reply to the from header. The reply to is an override
instruction, you're definitely supposed to only reply to the reply-to
header.
e.g. You email a business about something, they respond to you with an
email that's addressed so that your next reply goes back to where it
needs to go, such as to a particular sales consultant, or to the general
anyone in sales address.
I get the impression that this recent alleged improvement is from some
dingbat who just doesn't understand email and lists.
What I was referring to as possibly being something the mailing list
server was supplying was all the tags I listed above except for the
reply-to tag, especially the list-subscribe and the list-unsubscribe
tags. All those tags were in Rick's email just above what looked like
possibly a certificate of some sort.
The info that Thunderbird, or any other mailer, is using to decide that
a message is from a list rather than personal mail, is in the message
headers, not what's typed in the message body.
Pretty much the last lot of headers just before the message starts:
X-Mailman-Version: 3.1.0
Precedence: list
Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
List-Id: Community support for Fedora users <users.lists.fedoraproject.org>
Archived-At:
<
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.o...
List-Archive:
<
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.o...
List-Help: <mailto:users-request@lists.fedoraproject.org?subject=help>
List-Post: <mailto:users@lists.fedoraproject.org>
List-Subscribe: <mailto:users-join@lists.fedoraproject.org>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:users-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org>
The rest of the headers are just ordinary headers in any email. Pretty
much, any of these headers that have *list* somewhere in them could be
used by software to automatically identify it as list mail (the
precedence header, the various List- headers).
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64
(always current details of the computer that I'm writing this email on)
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is
no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages
posted to the mailing list.
Evolution keeps on telling me that it's refreshing, but I still want to
go and get a drink.