110136 - "Reply to Sender Only" is misleading and needs to be reworded

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Helge Hielscher]

When I right click on a message and select "Reply to Sender Only" I get a 
Compose Window with "To:reply_to_header_adress".

What I expected was "To: from_adress".
(from and reply_to are the mail headers)

I use mozilla 0.9.5.

Comment 1

[Sheela Ravindran]

reporter,
Which build id are you using?
I am using 2001-11-14-06 build on linux.  worksforme
Reply to sender only sets the correct recipient as To: sender address.
Can you try on a recent build.

If you are still seeing this please give the build id and steps for me to 
reproduce.  

Comment 2

[Helge Hielscher]

Well I tried a new build (2001-11-15-06-0.9.6, 2001111506) and it behaves the 
same.
Steps to reproduce:
1) choose a mail with From:[e-mail] and Reply-To:[e-mail] (my mail has a To: 
[e-mail] too, but that shouldnt make any difference)
2) right click on the message and select "Reply To Sender Only"
3) mozilla opens a mail composer window with To:[e-mail]

Comment 3

[Sheela Ravindran]

Looks like this is behaving as it should.
For example: compose new message
From: [e-mail]
To:   [e-mail]
reply-to: [e-mail](setting the reply-to in the compose window, you are saying
when you reply to this email it should be replied to the [e-mail] account instead
of [e-mail] account which is the sender.)

So receive this message and right click and reply to sender only should reply to
[e-mail] which is correct because you have already set while composing that you
want reply to go to [e-mail] and not [e-mail] even though [e-mail] is the sender.

I hope that I am being clear. If you try the same scenario in 4.x you will see
th e same results and this is behaving correclty. This bug is invalid.  

Comment 4

[Helge Hielscher]

First, the reason why I hope it would work with "Reply To Sender Only" was, that
I am subscribed to some mailing lists and per default the reply goes to the list.
What I need is a function to reply to the real sender.

I see no reason why "Reply", "Reply All" from the toolbar and "Reply To Sender
Only" and "Reply To All" from the context menu do all reply to the address given
by the reply-to field in the refering message.

I am going to post this to the n.m.p.mail-news group for discussing the best
place for this function.

Comment 5

[Sheela Ravindran]

Sure then this can be a request for enhancement. Sorry this has been working 
like this and the reason I marked it invalid is because this was logged as a 
bug.  
As per reporter's last comments will reopen the bug since this is a request for 
enhancement. I will leave it to the UI and engineer to look into this further. 

Comment 6

[Sheela Ravindran]

reassign

Comment 7

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Confirming RFE.  Though 'sender' is defined as the e-mail where the message came
from, not the 'reply-to' header.  Personally, I think this is INVALID

Comment 8

[Jonas Jørgensen]

This is in fact a bug. "Reply to Sender Only" activates the Reply feature which
obeys the Reply-To header. The fact that the spec states that the context menu
item should be labeled "Reply to Sender Only" is a bug in the spec. Reassigning
to spec author.

Comment 9

[Jonas Jørgensen]

The spec is here:
http://mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/threepane/MailMenus.html#Context

It states that the context menu entry should be labeled "Reply to Sender".

Comment 10

[jglick]

I'm not clear on what you are asking to be changed in the spec...

Comment 11

[Jonas Jørgensen]

"Reply to Sender" should be changed to "Reply" or "Reply to the message" so it
matches the description used other places where this functionality can be
accessed, such as the toolbar and the Message menu. "Reply to Sender" is not an
accurate description of this functionality since the reply will not always (in
the case of a Reply-To header) go to the sender.

Comment 12

[jglick]

The "Reply" button in the toolbar does the default action of replying to the 
newsgroup (the appropriate default for newsgroups), so we can't use "Reply" in 
the menus to mean Reply to the Sender/Reply-to-header. Since there are 3 
difference types of Replies for newsgroups, the menu items try to distinguish 
between them, Reply to Sender vs Reply to Newgroup vs Reply to All (sender, 
newsgroups, recipients). I'm not sure what we could change "Reply to Sender" to 
in order to meet your concern. 

Comment 13

[Gregg Meehan]

changing QA contact from Sheela to Gregg

Comment 14

[Julien Pierre]

I just got bit by this, in mozilla 1.2 alpha.

I wanted to send a private message to the administrator of a mailing list. I did
a "reply to sender only", and the message went out to the mailing list, much to
my surprise !

This is at the very least a privacy issue, as it can involuntarily cause data to
be leaked to the wrong recipients.

I think this is a serious bug which should have a priority assigned.

It appears that there is no way currently to reply to the sender only with the
built-in functions of Mozilla mail.

"Reply to sender only" in the context menu has the same functionality as the
"reply" button. Obviously the wording of the context menu is incorrect and
should just be "reply".

For "reply all", the wording in both the buttons and the menu are consistent
with what's expected.

This bug is clearly for changing the wording of the menu to be more accurate,
according to the title.

Is there a separate bug filed for the functionality I and the original reported
of this bug need, namely to be able to reply to the person in the "from" field ?

Currently to achieve this, one needs to :
- copy the from address to the clipboard with right-lick/copy email address
- hit reply
- manually highlight the entire content of the "to" field
- right-click and select "paste" to paste the email address.

This all should be possible to achieve in a one-click command.

Comment 15

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

Julien, where you replying from a newsgroup or from a pop/imap account? Do you
mind sending me the message (use forward as attachment). Thanks

Comment 16

[Kostub]

JGlick: In the newsgroup the reply button should reply to the sender of the
posting by default.To followup to the newsgroup there should be a seperate
followup button. So Reply to Sender Only does not make sense even in the
newsgroup context.

For the mail context see bug 170191 for an enhancement which allows you to
override the reply-to header. I think it is an important functionality that
Mozilla Mail is missing!

Comment 17

[Max Waterman]

I'm hitting this bug too, on OS X. I've unintentionally sent some sensitive
email to an entire email list. "Embarressing", you might say.

Note that netscape 4.X has this same misleading behaviour.

Does anyone plan to do anything about it? It's been a long time since anyone
commented on this. It has to be a high visibility problem.

Max.

Comment 18

[John T]

Another long interval between comments. I'm researching a different problem and
read this. I see that some comments didn't distinguish between mailing lists and
newsgroups. The original reporter was talking about using mailing lists (email). 

Right-clicking a message gives the context menu with the choice "Reply to Sender
Only", and selecting that puts the mailing-list address in the Reply window, not
the address of the original sender.

To actually reply to the sender, not the list, in a mailing list, I just
manually clear the address field in the reply-to compose window, and enter the
address of the intended recipient.

Has this bug been marked "won't fix"?

Comment 19

[John T]

Just posting to keep the "expire" monster at bay

Comment 20

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> Has this bug been marked "won't fix"?

WRT the summary, the bug is WONTFIX, since for normal email it's intended behaviour. OTOH, we really still suck in mailing list handling - but that's covered by bug 45715/bug 233417.