213480 - [Feature] Option to always set the Reply-to field to match the To: field of the message to which one is replying (for spam control)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[bugzilla.100.ipserc]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030425
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030425

[This is a feature request, not a bug. Bear with me on the longish preamble].
One relatively robust mechanism to control spam is to filter on the *To:*
address of the message. Why? The To: address is essentially the only part of the
message that can be trusted as being accurate. How? Give each potential sender
to oneself a unique email address for oneself that routes through a forwarding
service such as spamgourmet. How does the sender receive their oen pesonalized
version of your To: address? A message sent to one's single "public" email
address autogenerates a response with a new personalized To: address (optionally
hidden behind a Turing test) intended for use only by that potential sender,
with a warning that if any spam shows up to this address, all future messages to
this address will be filtered to trash. 

So everyone who sends you email uses a different To: address, and this To:
address uniquely identifies the sender. It's a more global implementation of the
common "throwaway hotmail account" method of registering on untrusted websites.

Why is this better than a whitelist? Because From addresses can be spoofed (i.e.
"From: [e-mail]" or worse, From oneself for those who send themselves
email reminders) but To: addresses essentially cannot.

What's the need for a new feature in Mail? For this to work, the Reply-to: field
in replies to incoming messages must be set dynamically to match the uniquely
assigned To: email used by the sender (not one's static "public" email address)
so that later messages in the thread are processed correctly. Otherwise replies
in the thread default back to the single statically-defined public address.

OK, it's kind of esoteric, but the inability to set the Reply-to: preference to
dynamically match the incoming To: address is a show-stopper in implementing
this interesting spam management tool. What do you think? 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Similar to bug 187578, which wants to set the 'From'-header identical to the
'Reply-To'-header. This should normally be enough, but if your account also has
a Reply-To definition, it might mess things up.

I think we should remove Reply-To entirely, because bug 187578 will be setting a
correct 'From' address anyway.  You prefer to set the 'Reply-To', but wouldn't
that expose your real email-account (in the 'From') to the spammer ? I'm using
SpamGourmet too, so I understand the idea ;-)

Comment 2

[bugzilla.100.ipserc]

Yes, it's similar to bug 187578 (sorry, I didn't find that one when searching
since I searched on reply-to, not from). But a little different. 187578 seems to
refer to setting from or reply-to to match the current email account defined in
the mail reader. I was thinking of someone who had many different email aliases
set up, all forwarding to a single account. The reply-to or from would be set to
the alias address, not the actual account address. I.e. From is set to the To
field of the incoming email, which is an public alias. The actual true email
address is hidden entirely from the outside world. 

Comment 3

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 4

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away until Aug 10)]

Don't want this for core. If someone needs it it should be pretty simple to do as an extension.

Comment 6

[Todd]

I don't see this as a "nice to have" I see this as a BUG!   And when you don't address your consumer's needs you become irrelevant.  I personally am tired of accidentally hitting the send button and realizing that I forgot to set the reply to: field equal to the recipient of the email received.  I too use a service that allows me to setup unique emails for each contact then when they refuse to remove you from their lists or forward you on you have a way to shut them down by preventing the forwarding of the email.

This needs done and since it's such a simple change as you stated above I can expect it will be accomplished post haste.

I am already teetering on moving to Outlook because Thunderbird has become so hostile to doing anything that the user's want.  I only have 3 complaints with Outlook but at least one of them is serious enough for me not to want to go but I will if requests for bug fixes keep going unheeded (ie never getting completed as several have or have just been shut down because the developers don't want to be bothered.)