Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
The notion that a recipient's MUA should change its behavior according
to the whim of some other author was broken with Reply-To and it's still
broken with MFT. In all cases the user agent's goal is to serve its
user. To do that well it needs to provide _consistent_ behavior, not
behavior that changes from one message to the next.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. The author of the
message that is being replied to is always going to have control over
where replies go absent manual editing of the destination fields, since
that author has complete control over all of the headers from which reply
destinations can be drawn.
In a sense that's correct, because the header recipient addresses and the
envelope recipient addresses don't have to agree at all. But the point
is that the replier needs to be fully aware of where his replies are going.
User agents that appear to change their behavior from one message to the
next do not promote such awareness.
Using MFT is just as consistent as not using MFT. Always using From as
the reply address is just as consistent as using Reply-To if present,
otherwise From. One of these things is more *complex* than the other, but
that's not the same thing as consistency.
The difference in (apparent) consistency occurs because Reply-To, MFT, or
similar fields are often not displayed to the recipient. The recipient
expects the reply to go to the sender and recipient addresses that were
displayed when he read the message, not to some other set of addresses that
were hidden from view.
Of course, if all of the header fields were displayed, the problem would
then be one of complexity.
Keith