Comment 43 for bug 52667

Okay here is my contribution...

First of all I would like to see this fix done very soon! Thanks Matthew!

Now observe the tooltips (on Win XP) of SM Mail (20050813 build) -

"Reply All - Reply to Sender and All Recipients" - that's good.

"Reply - Reply to the message". Wow, can you get more ambiguous (w.r.t the
present topic) than that? It doesn't say that you reply to the original sender.
Just "to the message".

AFAI am concerned, I always think of the Reply button as something which sends
mail back to the from address (unless there's a separate reply-to address
entered by the sender). I think of the Reply All button as something that sends
the mail to all those people involved in the mail I received. And "all those
people involved" is determined by possibly multiple To addresses and CC
addresses as provided by the person who sent the mail I am replying to.

So I think that Reply should be renamed Reply Sndr (hey, if "Get Msgs" is okay,
then why not "Reply Sndr"?) and Reply All should change itself to Reply List
whenever the mail being viewed has a List-Post (or other applicable) header. To
provide for the rare case that a posting to a list also has other To headers or
CC headers, then a drop-down box ("small triangle button") should be provided so
that the user can manually select the original "Reply All" option of the button.

A better idea would be to separate the Reply List button altogether. Somebody
here complained that that will "take up valuable screen real-estate". Honesty, I
have only seven buttons on my toolbar and it takes up less than 50% of my screen
width. So I don't think showing a separate Reply List button is really a
problem. Maybe allow the user to enable it via preferences, like for the Junk
Mail button, Delete button etc.

If it is adjudged that the real-estate problem is really there, then another
option would be to display the Reply-List button only when the mail has a
List-Post (or related) header. This will also draw user attention to the fact
that such an option is separately available.

But a shortcut for this is really important. At least half of the time I use the
keyboard Ctrl+R to reply to mail. Not allowing a shortcut would be a serious
handicap and lose us users.

In summary my preferences and recommendations are:

1. Rename "Reply" to "Reply Sndr".
2. Add a separate "Reply List" button. If needed to save screen space (for what
else I don't understand) then make it disappear when the mail doesn't have the
appropriate headers.
3. Give the "Reply List" button a shortcut.

Lists should be intelligent and use the RFC specification, not munge headers.
Mail clients should be intelligent and use the RFC specification, not force
users to manually enter/edit the to/cc field.