What should the "reply to all" button in mail clients (web, programs, apps, ..., any) do?
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What should the "reply to all" button in mail clients (web, programs, apps, ..., any) do?
This question may sound silly, but it is not. It is based on a natural thing to me that is being completely denied by my mail service provider, Fastmail. I think it's ilogical, but maybe there's something new there... lets see.
Who should the "reply to all" button in mail clients (web, programs, apps, ..., any) send a message to?
[.X.] a. all in this list: address in "from" header; addresses in the "reply-to" header; all addresses in "to" and "cc" headers
[...] b. all in this list: address in "from" header; addresses in the "reply-to" header; all addresses in "to" and "cc" headers
Quote:
Quote:
When I click on the "reply to all" button in the message with headers:
... The compose message screen does **not** set the destination
address with both address the message contains. It blindly follows the
reply-to header, exactly like the normal "reply" button would do.
Quote:
Nope, it does exactly what you would expect reply-all to do, which in
this case happens to be the same as non-reply-all. It takes the existing
To/Cc addresses, adds in the Reply-To address (which overrides the From
address), then deduplicates and removes the calculated "From" address
in the new message. In the case of the headers shown above, this only
leaves one address: the list address.
In mailing lists it happens a lot to me that I want I reply to whom sent the message (not necessarily part of the list), but also replying to the list. "Reply to all" must mean this, or I would want to have a third kind of button that would need an exagerated "all" word for its name. For some mailing lists, the messages comes with the reply-to header, so simple reply clicks would not wrongly answer for just whom sent the message; instead, it replies to the list... but sometimes we know and want to do it differently. It is not so uncommon for me, as I said, that I want to reply to all
Distribution: Mint 20.1 on workstation, Debian 11 on servers
Posts: 1,328
Rep:
My impression is that it just sends to everyone it was sent to, so whoever is in the to: field of the original email is in the to field of the reply, and same with the cc. It won't do bcc though, as I don't think the client will even be aware of that.
reply all = reply to all visible addresses except myself.
it doesn't really matter, because after a few embarrassing incidents (i'm sure all of us experienced it at least once) i ALWAYS check who the mail goes to before sending it.
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