When receiving list email in my setup, the last "delivered-to" entry that matches any of my identities is the identity of my mail storage account (gmail) as opposed to my "official" account (web.de). The "reply to list" heuristic thus picks the gmail address as the "From" address for any reply to the list. On the contrary, I really want to reply to the mailing list from the "official" address which is registered with the list and thus has posting privileges. This one is my default identity and due to the recently introduced heuristic determination of the "From:" address, I have to manually pick my official identity manually every time. Half of the times I forget that and need to cancel moderated posts and repost. This is annoying. I understand the idea behind the implemented approach but I think, it is too heuristical to work in all circumstances, so it should be optional! I guess, an about:config-style setting would be OK. If the majority of people find the present (new) behaviour beneficial (which I cannot tell), then probably defaulting to the current heuristics. An alternative suggestion would be to add a "From" field to the address book which allows to specifiy a fixed "From" for individual recipients. This information could be used to override the heuristics if present. For me, this would still be a bit cumbersome because I'd need to set this up for every list that I receive. I would still prefer being able to switch of the heuristics altogether. Original comment: bug 461669, comment 23

(In reply to Tilman Vogel from comment #0) Sorry, typo. Wrong: > Original comment: bug 461669, comment 23 Correct: Original comment: bug 461669, comment 32

Moving to "Message Compose Window" but maybe this belongs in "Mail Window Front End" or even "Account Manager" or "Preferences".

Yeah, I can definitely see the use-case you're describing. (I'm not sure how many people separate out official accounts from mail storage accounts, but it still seems like something we would want to take into, uh, account. :) I'm not sure whether a preference or an address book field would be better. (I can see the preference as being easier to mass-configure, but I would also kind of like the ability to have certain people always use my work address, and this could be a step in that direction.) Anyways, I'm cc-ing Mike Conley, who's thinking about the address book a fair bit these days. Thanks, Blake.

Maybe it's worth doing this as an extension first so that we can figure out what way is best?

(In reply to Tilman Vogel from comment #0) > I understand the idea behind the implemented approach but I think, it is too > heuristical to work in all circumstances, so it should be optional! Why does this heuristic do different things for "Reply" and "Reply to list"?

After reading through bug 461669 I get the general idea. But unfortunately in some cases (my setting is similar to Tilman's) neither the "Delivered to"-hint nor the server-hint do the right thing. Maybe a solution is to cycle not only through all "delivered to"-headers, but also take "Received: for" into account to find a corresponding identity.

The author of the original patch (see bug 461669) foresaw this issue. > not every mail server will add "delivered-to" headers But apparently he thought looking into all "received" headers to consuming > there are a vast amount of "received" headers which are not relevent. Nevertheless since the "delivered to" header don't work in our cases a solution might be to make it optional to include the received headers in the heuristic. If someone confirms that my guess is right and helps me to develop this as an addon, I'll give it a try (but I'll definitively need some guidance since I have never ever submitted an patch for anything nor developed an addon). Quotes from: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Students/StatusUpdates/2010-03-12#Kefu_Zhao

I've also been burned by this... I have several aliases on the same mailbox, and when I reply to mailing lists it picks my main id by default, instead of the alias registered with the mailing list, to which the mail was addressed. The aggravating factor is that if I use "reply all" then it picks the right id...

I believe this bug (and probably a number of other similar ones) can be fixed by: * Considering Received: headers in addition to Delievered-To: * If there are multiple headers matching addresses in configured identities, using the one which is closest to the sender. In other words, finding the identity whose address was handled first during the delivery process.