Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
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.
I agree with this.
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.
Surely this is fundamentally a UA problem, though, isn't it?
Yes. The more I look at the problem of replies, the more it looks like the
problem is 90% UA construction and 10% protocol. Which probably means that
adding more protocol isn't the most important part of a solution. And
since adding more protocol tends to mean more complexity, doing so could
easily make the situation worse. The thing to do is to get UA functionality
right, _then_ to see what new protocol frobs (if any) are appropriate.
UAs clearly do need to show where replies will go, and insofar as they
don't do that with Reply-To now, I think that's a problem. But it's not
that they're incapable of doing that.
No, but current standards are not encouraging them to do that, and in some
cases they may even be discouraging that.
Of course, if all of the header fields were displayed, the problem would
then be one of complexity.
I think it would be better for the UA to work out the logic for the user,
at least for UAs not targetted at sophisticated users.
I think it would be better if no "logic" were needed. The decision of who
to reply to belongs to the person composing the reply. For the UA to make
it easy for that person to "fill in the blanks" is reasonable. For the UA
to try to emply "logic" to _decide_ (or equivalently, _guess_) where the
message should go is not reasonable.
Keith