(*** This bug was imported into bugs.kde.org ***) Package: kmail Version: KDE 3.0.7 CVS/CVSup/Snapshot Severity: wishlist Installed from: Compiled sources Compiler: Not Specified OS: Not Specified OS/Compiler notes: Not Specified I'm referring to the article "Reply-to munging considered harmful": http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html I think this problem needs to be solved by better handling by email clients. I'm afraid this is rather long but I want to make sure that what I want (and why I want it) is clear. The author is right on the subject of technical issues. However he is wrong about the Principle of Least Surprise. The point is normal people use graphical email clients and they couldn't care less about the technical implications of email. When they're looking at the Reply button they read it as "Reply to this E-Mail" not as "Reply to the author of this E-Mail". If you think about it there's a crucial difference there: The E-Mail came to them through a mailing list where open discussion takes place. Let me draw an analogy here: Consider a real-life meeting which is also an open discussion. If somebody makes a statement in this meeting and you want to reply to this statement do you reply openly or do you reply privately (by whispering to him)? I'm sure you expect to reply openly. That's why normal people expect to send a mail to the list and NOT the original author when they hit the Reply button. Reply-to munging is a kludge to "fix" this. I hope you're with me this far. What we really need are three different Reply buttons with the following semantics: 1. Reply to this E-Mail 2. Reply to the original author 3. Reply to all recipients 2. and 3. should have the behaviour known right now. 1. should be a "clever" addition. It could figure out what to do by looking at Mailing-list headers in the mail. Of course there's a danger of confusing the users: if they want to answer to a standard private email buttons 1. and 2. would do the same thing (bad design!). So maybe depending on the e-mail only a subset of those three buttons could be shown: a) private no Cc: only show button "Reply to this E-Mail" (default) b) private with Ccs: show buttons "Reply to the author" (default) "Reply to all recipients" c) mailing-list: show buttons "Reply to this E-Mail" (default) "Reply to the original author" d) mailing-list with Ccs: show all three buttons (?) with "Reply to this E-Mail" being the default This feature would end all those mailing list Reply-to setting wars once and for all. (Submitted via bugs.kde.org)
Created attachment 835 [details] Screenshot of mulberry's "reply to" dialog When you click "reply to" in Mulberry (there is only one such button) it presents a list of *all* the email addresses involved in a message including the From: address with a suggested set of fields for the reply. You can manually change this (moving people from To: to Cc: etc and removing them, adding people who aren't suggested, etc) or use the buttons at the bottom to choose different standard recipient sets. Although this introduces an extra step in the reply to process, I find it extremely powerful, as it gives me total confidence that my response is going to the right people. It also allows me to "reply to" messages I've sent which I sometimes use to add information which I forgot (this is convenient and results in saner threading). Would a similar feature solve this problem? I was hunting for "reply to" wish list items to see if anyone had added anything like this when I came across this report. Changing "reply to" to a drop down button in the tool bar, and allowing the user to choose which type of reply to was the default (including always popping up a box such as this) would be ideal for me, I think. Feel free to ask for more details if this sounds interesting but isn't clear. Cheers, Hamish
This dialog box looks like the perfect thing for fine-tuning, but as you said it adds an additional step. The solution with a drop down button (similar to what the Forward button does, right?) sounds good to me personally, though I'm obviously no HID expert. That drop-down list would contain To Sender, To All, and <whatever you call that dialog box>, right? The default default for the drop down button should probably be To Sender (the same thing as the simple "Reply" button right now?)
In KDE 3.2 there will be a Reply button (which basically behaves like the Reply to E-Mail proposed above) with a drop down menu which has the following entries: - Reply (the same as the button itself) - Reply to All - Reply to Author - Reply to Mailing-List