bug mail should preserve to/cc fields

[Martin Pool]

It's reasonably common for someone to send mail both to a mailing list and to a bug. In this case, as both a list and bug subscriber, I get two copies of the mail, one from the list and one from malone, which is fine.

What is not so good is that this mail going through malone causes it to lose it's To and Cc (and I guess reply-to) fields, so that if I reply to the bug mail, it won't go to the list or other people who might be CC'd. For instance the mail echoed through the list has

From: Karl Fogel <email address hidden>
Subject: [RFC] Fixing bug #306394: status should tolerate nonexistent file.
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:58:17 -0500
To: <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>
User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.60 (gnu/linux)

and from malone has just

From: Karl Fogel <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 306394] [RFC] Fixing bug #306394: status should tolerate
        nonexistent file.
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:58:17 -0000
To: <email address hidden>

I realize that the original message context has probably been lost by the time malone generates a new mail notification so it might be hard to fix this.

[Eleanor Berger (intellectronica)]

The problem with inclusing the cc and reply-to in the notification you get from malone, is that the notification email is not an exact copy of the original message. That is not to say that this is not a reasonable request, but I think that we'll have to think how to do that without falsifying mail from users.

Should we simply tack the originial cc and reply-to to the notification, or is there any other solution that we could try?

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Isn't "Reply-To" actually used to direct replies to Malone itself? (i.e. you can't preserve it, or you'll mess up the entire email interface)

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

Since the Malone mail is already made to appear like it comes from the user, the issue of "falsifying mail from users" is already present, and would not be exacerbated by also including the original CC and reply-to information as well.

One solution to Danilo's point is to add rather than replace: make Malone's reply-to include both addresses, Malone's itself and the original message's reply-to.

It's a pity that the Malone mail can't use the same Message-ID as the original mail, because mailers that fold (unify) duplicate messages depend on that... But they are not the exact same message, so they really can't use the same Message-ID, I guess. (However, the In-Reply-To and References header information could be preserved, if we don't do that already.)

[Graham Binns (gmb)]

Marking this as triaged for the sake of the better bug notification story, though I'm not sure there's a clear way to fix this.