[Discuss] DMARC issue, Yahoo and beyond

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 03:25:09PM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> Derek Martin wrote:
> > Here's why it IS thoughtless: You're talking about the general case of
> > lists setting the reply-to header to the *list* address.  I'm talking
> > about setting it to the *sender's* address.  The former is very bad,
> > for the reasons you suggest.  The latter has NONE of the effects you
> > described.
> 
> You did not read what I wrote:
> >> When set to the original author it breaks reply to list
> >> and reply to all functions in those same programs.
 
Apparently I am mistaken: it does (at least partially) break
group-reply in every known mail client as far as I can tell.  But
there's no reason this needs to be the case; that breakage is
mind-bendingly stupid.  The mail client should do what the user
intended: if reply-all is selected, the mail client should respond to
the sender (or at least wherever they designated replies to go via
reply-to) AND all of the other recipients.  If it does not do that, it
is IMO broken.  Which apparently is all mail clients.

However, what I wrote here is true:
 
> > Moreover, if your "good mail programs" obey the correct headers
> > (List-Post and/or Mail-Followup-To), which all of the clients you 
> > named do AFAIK, then setting reply-to has *absolutely no effect* on
> > list-reply functionality, ever.

Whether or not your mail clients are doing it right, this is what they
are supposed to do.  And Mutt, at least, does:  I replied to this
message with Mutt's list-reply function and did not modify the headers
in any fashion.  Mutt properly ignored your reply-to header and did
what I asked it to do.  It had *absolutely no effect* as I said.

Mutt still gets the group-reply case wrong, for no reason I can
imagine.

Actually, Thunderbird gets most of this mostly right:

  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Help_Documentation:Mail-Followup-To_and_Mail-Reply-To

I guess I had forgotten how much e-mail clients still suck,
unbelievably, after 45+ years of e-mail.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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