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Comment 3 for bug 744001

Revision history for this message
Tim Cross (tcross) wrote : Re: [Bug 744001] Re: reply from the sent-to address

Although it does seem complicated, pcrisis works really well. It has a lot
of functionality - once you come to grips with it, it is quite
straigh-forward.

I think the problem is that this seems like a simple thing when you first
look at it, but once you begin to look at the details, it quickly becomes
more complicated than you initially think. For example, the deliver-to filed
is no good as this can vary depending on how you collect hour mail. All the
mail I recieve via fetchmail has the same delivered-to header regardless of
where it was retrieved from (i.e. sent to address). In fact, Im not sure you
always have a delieverd-to header.

One of the nice things about pcrisis is that your not restricted to just
using various headers in mails you reply to. It is able to set headers based
on the address your sending to - this is handy when you need to initiate a
message to someone and want it to appear to have come form a specific mail
adress. I use this from home when using VM and need to send person, work and
list messages and want them to all appear distint (I don't want my personal
email being circulated at work etc).

If we did decide to integrate this sort of functionality into VM, we need to
make sure it works regardless of the individual setup i.e. handle mixture of
local and imap/pop, thunderbird mail boxes, multiple smtp servers, etc.
While we might be able to build on pcrisis and/or borrow ideas from gnus (I
like its posting-styles setup) or thunderbird, we need to also acknowledge
that getting this right is not a quick or simple task.

Tim

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Arik <email address hidden> wrote:

> hmm, this seems quite complicated to do a simple thing. Maybe people
> never do this, in which case I can struggle with that myself, but it
> seems other mailers make this simple. Perhaps an approach could be to
> use the Delivered-To header (if present) for the From field so long as
> it is in a vm-valid-mail-sending-addresses list. If it is not present
> (delivered-to header or valid mails variable), simply do the default
> which is not adding a from header.
>
> This is more from the accessibility point of view, its a little clunky
> seeming to rely on external packages to do these seemingly simple
> everyday things. For more complicated on the fly actions pcrisis (or
> custom hooks) may be suitable. I also wonder whether profiles would
> strictly be necessary. Virtual folders, auto-folders etc are already
> equipped to handle this (based on headers). Maybe I'm overlooking other
> profile based actions that are like this and would be desirable.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to VM.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/744001
>
> Title:
> reply from the sent-to address
>
> Status in VM (View Mail) for Emacs:
> Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> This is a feature request. It would be useful to have an option like
> vm-reply-from-recipient-address (or so) that will insert a "From:"
> header with the address to which the email was sent. This is useful in
> cases where a vm user has multiple mailboxes for different addresses
> in the same session, where only one can be the 'user-mail-address'.
> This can be done in such a way that a from header will not be inserted
> if the default is appropriate.
>