RE: Question about this mailing list

[Mark Rivers via Tech-talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Lewis,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  I also found that Reply All is not even an option for tech-talk messages received on an iPhone.

Mark


-----Original Message-----
From: J. Lewis Muir <jlmuir@imca-cat.org> 
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2018 3:26 PM
To: Mark Rivers <rivers@cars.uchicago.edu>
Cc: ralph.lange@gmx.de; tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: Re: Question about this mailing list

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 11:21 AM Mark Rivers <rivers@cars.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Here are the complete headers of that message as retrieved from Outlook:

[snip]

> Note that I was mistaken, there is a To: field, it is just higher up in the header and I missed it.
> Note also that in this message To: and From: are not the same, unlike what Ralph said.
>
> To: "tech-talk@aps.anl.gov" <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>
> From: =?gb2312?B?y+/M7NCl?= via Tech-talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>
> Reply-To: =?gb2312?B?y+/M7NCl?= <suntianxiao@sinap.ac.cn>
> Sender: <tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov>

Your copy of the email and mine are essentially identical after I remove Received headers and such:

===
--- muir-header-filtered.txt 2018-11-29 11:58:51.000000000 -0600
+++ rivers-header-filtered.txt 2018-11-29 12:03:59.000000000 -0600
@@ -25,6 +25,10 @@
  <mailto:tech-talk-request@aps.anl.gov?subject=subscribe>
 From: =?gb2312?B?y+/M7NCl?= via Tech-talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>
 Reply-To: =?gb2312?B?y+/M7NCl?= <suntianxiao@sinap.ac.cn>
-Sender: tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov
+Sender: <tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov>
 Errors-To: tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov
-Return-Path: <tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov>
+Return-Path: tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov
+X-MS-Exchange-Organization-Network-Message-Id:
fef35cc2-4dfc-4e60-74fe-08d655de68f9
+X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthSource: carsmail.CARS.APS.ANL.GOV
+X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs: Anonymous
+X-MS-Exchange-Transport-EndToEndLatency: 00:00:00.2031686
===

So, in mine, I don't have the angle brackets around the Sender and Return-Path addresses; that doesn't matter.  And I don't have the
X-MS-Exchange-* fields; that doesn't matter either.

This tells me the difference is in the MUA.  Using Gmail, if I click the "Reply to all" button for that email, it creates a reply with the following header fields:

  To: suntianxiao@sinap.ac.cn
  Cc: tech-talk@aps.anl.gov

For you with Outlook, it doesn't do that.

And I just tried with iOS 12.1 Mail, and it doesn't do that either: I tap the Reply button and the only reply choice is "Reply"; there is no "Reply All", so it's a pain to reply-all from iOS Mail.

As you alluded to, I think this change in behavior may be due to Argonne's email changes, DMARC in particular.  Andrew, or whoever the list administrator is, would probably know.  Specifically, it seems that Mailman, the mailing list manager software for the Tech-Talk list, is rewriting the header as follows.

The field

  From: [name] [email-address]

becomes two fields

  From: [name] via Tech-Talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>
  Reply-To: [name] [email-address]

I think this rewrite is causing the reply-all function of some MUAs (e.g., Outlook and iOS Mail) to not work correctly.

It would be helpful to know exactly how Outlook and iOS Mail determine the recipients for a reply-all.  Maybe someone has documented it somewhere; I don't know.

Maybe Outlook and iOS Mail honor a Mail-Followup-To or Mail-Reply-To field, and the problem could be solved by making the mailing list manager software add one or both of those fields to the header of any Tech-Talk email it sends; I have no idea.

Or maybe there's a mailing list manager software option that could be tweaked.  Based on the X-Mailman-Version header field, the Tech-Talk list is being managed by Mailman 2.1.12.  That is the stable 2.x series version, but there is a stable 3.x series version too: Mailman 3.2.0.  In 3.2.0, I see an interesting option "reply_goes_to_list" at

  https://mailman.readthedocs.io/en/latest/src/mailman/handlers/docs/dmarc-mitigations.html

that says

  reply_goes_to_list

    If this is set to other than no-munging of Reply-To:, the original
    From: goes in Cc: rather than Reply-To:. This is intended to make
    MUA functions of reply and reply-all have the same effect with
    messages to which mitigations have been applied as they do with
    other messages.

I wonder if using this option would make the rewrite of

  From: [name] [email-address]

become

  From: [name] via Tech-Talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>
  Cc: [name] [email-address]

and if that would make the reply-all function of Outlook and iOS Mail work again.

Yet another approach is to, if you're willing and able to insert a header rewriting program into your local mail delivery pipeline, rewrite the header back to how it was before the DMARC changes.  That is, for any Tech-Talk mailing list message, rewrite

  From: [name] via Tech-Talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>
  Reply-To: [name] [email-address], [original-reply-to]

back to

  From: [name] [email-address]
  Reply-To: [original-reply-to]

But if there was a Reply-To field in the original, then I don't know exactly how the first rewrite works; hopefully it adds to the Reply-To field address list and doesn't just overwrite it.  If it overwrites it, then there's no way to recover the original.  If it prepends or appends, then you can just undo whatever it does to rewrite back to the original.

Lewis