335464 - Reply with Template filter should not use "Reply-To:" address per RFC

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Filters, defect)

Description

[Curt Hawley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Build Identifier: Firefox version 1.5.0.2 (20060308)

I had some rules established in outlook that worked perfectly.  
After switching to thunderbird, I had to recreate the message filters and actions.   I also had to create new templates for a filter rule that sends a reply based on subject line criteria.   The problem is that I need to have the reply go to the "from" address and not the "reply-to" address.     



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. see above
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
see above

Expected Results:  
see above

There should be a way to toggle to use the from address or the reply-to address.  IT's true in most cases these are the same, but not always.   
And it's also true that in most cases when they are not the same, you'd want to use the reply-to.   But in my case I need to send the reply to the "From" address.   A separate action for that, or a way to toggle the pointer would work.   I'm not sure how Outlook Express does it but it seems to work consistently.  But I'm stuck now and can't go back to outlook express because there is no export feature.

Comment 1

[mike knopfler]

This bug still is within Thunderbird 2.0.0.19.  I am trying to reply with a template and it only uses the "reply-to:" header instead of:

- check to see if "reply-to:" exists.  If exists, use this email address else next.
- check to see if "return-path:" exists.  If exists, use this email address else next.
- send via "from:"

Also, it should check all 3 above and if anyone of them are different, we should have the option to select all or only one of them.

It has been 2+ years that this is broken and would like to know if this is ever going to get resolved.

Comment 2

[mike knopfler]

In its current state, the reply with template feature is 100% broken if there is no reply-to: header.  This should have not been classified as an enhancement but a minor bug instead.

Comment 3

[:aceman]

Mike, that is something else than comment 0 is requesting. He wants to use From even when Reply-to exists.

If what you say it still true in Thunderbird 7 then please file it as a new bug.

Curt, is this still missing in Thunderbird 7?

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Using Reply-To for automatic replies is actually prohibited per 3834
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3834#section-4 

It recommends to only use Return-Path. That header doesn't seem to always be present though. According to the spec that's a misconfiguration, but it does seem fairly common at least in the small sample i checked.

The RFC says

   A Service Responder MAY deliver the response to the address(es) from
   the >From field, or to another address from the request payload,
   provided this behavior is precisely defined in the specification for
   that service.  Services responders SHOULD NOT use the Reply-To field
   for this purpose.

...

   Use of the From field as the destination for automatic responses has
   some of the same problems as use of Reply-To.  In particular, the
   From field may list multiple addresses, while automatic responses
   should only be sent to a single address.  

I've yet to see any multi-from addresses in the wild though, so the problem with using From should be very small.