Configuring Majordomo to not break Thunderbird’s "Reply To All" option
I just configured Majordomo to set headers correctly when sending emails to the qa@bugzilla.org mailing-list so that the "Reply To All" option in Thunderbird will work as expected. Blake Winton (working for Mozilla Messaging) thought this would be a good idea to blog about it.
Majordomo was configured to override the Reply-To header and replace it by qa@bugzilla.org. The goal is to help broken email clients which don’t understand list headers. The problem with this configuration is that "Reply To All" only replies to the mailing-list, which is a problem when the sender of the initial email is not in the mailing-list. And if you don’t pay attention to this, you will forget to CC him and the guy will never get any reply. I considered this as a bug and reported it on b.m.o as bug 505374.
To fix the problem, I had to add the following two lines to the ‘message_headers‘ parameter in Majordomo:
List-Id: QA Bugzilla <$LIST@$HOST>
List-Post: <mailto:$LIST@$HOST>
I also had to set the ‘override_reply_to‘ parameter to ‘no‘ and leave the ‘reply_to‘ parameter empty, instead of the existing $LIST@$HOST value. This way, the original Reply-To header, if present, is no longer overriden and the "Reply To All" option will send the original sender a reply, as expected. Thanks to the List-Id and List-Post headers, Thunderbird 3 will also offer you the "Reply To List" option, which lets you reply to the mailing-list only. And you can also choose the usual "Reply" option to reply to the sender only, ignoring the mailing-list.
I think bug 505374 might still be a bug.
I sort of agree that the "Reply All" button should reply to all the addresses, but then again, maybe it should use the Reply-To header, as it currently does… There’s certainly room for discussion about what we should be doing in that case.
I also did a little more research into Majordomo, and turned up the link https://cod.sandelman.ca/cgi-bin/mj_wwwusr/domain=lists.sandelman.ca?&user=&passw=&list=GLOBAL&func=help&extra=configset_config_defaults which has another way that you could add the required headers.
Thanks,
Blake.
The way Thunderbird 3 handles list mail is awesome now. If only all mail clients worked like that…