Michael <mb_devuan-mailinglist@???> wrote:

>> Argh. Sending to the list this time.
>>
>> Please don't set "Reply-to" on list emails.
>>
>> Antony.
>
> I’m pretty sure the individuals aren’t doing it explicitly. This list just
> doesn’t seem to create, or override really, the headers quite right. Some
> messages here I hit reply (like this one) and the proper “To:
> dng@???” shows up, on others someone’s name is populated in the
> To: box. Other lists, you hit reply and To: is always populated correctly.
>
> golinux?, other admins?, is there a config option somewhere in the backend
> to ‘fix’ this?

Unfortunately I think it's one of those things where you have to break some stuff to work around the deliberate breakage implemented with malice aforethought by many large email providers.

The problem is SPF, DMARC, and friends. These basically provide information about where emails may come from - eg gmail may only come from Google's servers. This is a problem for any system that forwards email - such as mailing lists and mail servers setup to forward email for (say) info@??? to ntplumb2458798@???.

So, someone using gmail sends a message to dng@??? which is delivered and then forwarded to all the list users. Some of those users will be using mail services that check SPF etc - and oh dear, there's an email which purports to come from gmail but it's actually being sent from a dyne.org server. So it gets discarded as obviously spam.

What they've down with the list (and I've seen it with other lists too) is: if the mail matches some criteria, then the originator's address is replaced with the list address and a reply to header is added. Thus for those users on a broken mail system (such as gmail, or hotmail, or ... they still get the list emails instead of not seeing mails from some proportion of list users.
The downside is what you see.

Not sure what the criteria are - whether it's based on there being certain headers in the email, whether the sender domain has SPF records etc, or what.

One answer is to always use reply to all and then move/remove addresses so you just have a single destination of the list address. I do ths all the time out of habit - partly because my mailer does somethings slightly differently with reply all, partly because I'm on a few lists and they all seem to do things differently (some have always left the senders address, some have always replaced it, some have always used a reply to, ...