I'm the tracker admin for our group. When people reply to NOSY email 
using their favorite mailer, the mail gets sent 'To' the roundup admin, 
me. The 'Reply-To' email attribute should be set to the author of the 
issue.

Attached is a fixed version. A summary of the diff is:
*** 524,537 **** --- 524,537 ----
Set 'In-Reply-To' to the tracker name since it may be useful. Changed 
'Reply-To' to the author, or the from_address as a fallback.

*** 558,574 **** --- 558,563 ----
Removed the 'In-Reply-To' since it is duplicate due the above change.

*** 623,632 **** --- 612,617 ----
Removed duplicate message attributes. To verify I looked at the raw NOSY 
message to make sure that there were no duplicates, and the needed 
attributes were present.

In message <1363975531.48.0.788566992358.issue2550803@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
 <1363975531.48.0.788566992358.issue2550803@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>,
Tom Ekberg writes:

>New submission from Tom Ekberg:
>
>I'm the tracker admin for our group. When people reply to NOSY email 
>using their favorite mailer, the mail gets sent 'To' the roundup admin, 
>me. The 'Reply-To' email attribute should be set to the author of the 
>issue.

I can't look at the patch at the moment but going from what you wrote
above:

  The reply to address should be set to the email address of the
  tracker, so the reply goes back to the tracker and is recorded on the
  issue.

Are you using the email gateway to access your tracker?  If not, then
I am not sure how this should be done. Setting it to the email address
registered to the user seems wrong somehow for a couple of reasons:

  1) it exposes the user's email address (a big deal at some sites)
  2) it doesn't record the response with the issue as it should

the admin address should be used as the email envelope address since
that is where bounces etc. are sent IIRC. But having the admin address
listed as the from header or reply-to header is broken and I don't
see that replicated on my test tracker.

>Attached is a fixed version. A summary of the diff is:
>*** 524,537 **** --- 524,537 ----
>Set 'In-Reply-To' to the tracker name since it may be useful. Changed 
>'Reply-To' to the author, or the from_address as a fallback.

If you aren't using the mail gateway, I claim the responses to the
email should bounce and the user will have to use the web interface to
respond. Having the author in the reply to sets up a channel for
correspondence that is not recorded by the tracker.

Also the in-reply-to header should be set to the message id if it's a
reply to another message so that threading works right. IIRC the msg
object creates/records the message ids so threading will work.

>*** 558,574 **** --- 558,563 ----
>Removed the 'In-Reply-To' since it is duplicate due the above change.
>
>*** 623,632 **** --- 612,617 ----
>Removed duplicate message attributes. To verify I looked at the raw NOSY 
>message to make sure that there were no duplicates, and the needed 
>attributes were present.

I talked to the person who initially installed the first roundup on one 
of our systems. He said he was aware of the possibility of having a NOSY 
reply get inserted into an issue's messages, but opted out. The reason 
was that people add lots of cruft to their email: the repeated history 
of replies and confidentiality notices that aren't germane to the issue.

I understand the concern about exposing the author's email in a large 
site.

Perhaps another [mail] or [nosy] config option could be added to allow 
the Reply-To to go to the author or roundup?

If you agree with this compromise I'll work on it and attach my result 
to this issue.

> The reason was that people add lots of cruft to their email: 
> the repeated history 
> of replies and confidentiality notices that aren't germane to the issue.

Note that the citation and the signature can be stripped from the
email by roundup. There is a configuration option for stripping the 
citation if I remember correctly.
The problem with not responding to the tracker is that the stream
of exchanges goes beside the tracker, so it does not contain
the full set of records anymore.

> Perhaps another [mail] or [nosy] config option could be added to allow 
> the Reply-To to go to the author or roundup?

I agree with John that in the case that you do not want to receive emails,
you may want to set the sender to something like 
noreply@yoursite.example.com.

But another config options for explicitely setting the reply-to to
the author would be fine with me, if you really have the use case.

Best,
Bernhard

This issue is now nearly three years old.

@Tom: if you read this now and if this topic is still important
for you, please reply.

Summary: The behaviour of Roundup setting Reply-To: to the tracker
instance is important to keep email discussions archived in issues.
Citing from doc/overview.txt:

 Submission and Discussion
 -------------------------
 ...
 2. All e-mail messages sent by Roundup have their "Reply-To:"
    field set to Roundup's address, and have the item's
    number in the "Subject:" field.  Thus, any replies to the
    initial announcement and subsequent threads are all received
    by Roundup.  Roundup notes the item number in the "Subject:"
    field of each incoming message and appends the message
    to the appropriate spool.

But sometimes this behaviour might not be desirable.  See msg4832,
msg4834 for an use case explanation.
I've modified the title of this issue to make this request clearer.

Adding a new configuration option handling the Reply-To:-header 
as suggested by Bernard in msg4835 now does not look very hard
for me (including tests and doc I estimate I would only a hour or so).
But personally I've no strong need for this feature.

Best regards, Peter.

This is in response to msg5496 by Peter Funk.

Yes, this is still important to me. We don't use the email gateway because 
of concern regarding spam and redundant Re:/Re:/Re: clutter. Having a 
configuration option so replies go to either the author or to the email 
gateway makes sense to me.

Tom Ekberg added the comment:
> Yes, this is still important to me. We don't use the email gateway
because 
> of concern regarding spam and redundant Re:/Re:/Re: clutter. Having a 
> configuration option so replies go to either the author or to the email 
> gateway makes sense to me.

In your patched file
http://issues.roundup-tracker.org/file1496/roundupdb.py 
you removed the following lines:
526            # set reply-to to the tracker
527            message['Reply-To'] = tracker_name

I propose something like this instead:

       # fetch reply-to:-config:
       replyto_config = self.db.config.MAIL_REPLYTO_ADR
       ...

               if replyto_config:
	           if replyto_config == "AUTHOR":
		       replyto_adr = authaddr
		   else:
		       replyto_adr = replyto_config
	       else:
	           replyto_adr = tracker_name
               message['Reply-To'] = replyto_adr

This would allow three possibilities for the new configuration option:
If not set it would use the tracker_name as it was intended in the 
original Roundup design.  If set to "AUTHOR" it would use the address
of the author and if set to some fixed address like "noreply@example.com"
or "moderator@example.com" it would put this in.

What do you think?

Further in file1496 you added a modification of the In-Reply-To:-header 
instead.  Do you remember and can explain to me why you wanted to 
manipulate the In-Reply-To:-header?
I currently don't understand what you wanted to achieve by this change.

Best Regards, Peter Funk
-- 
Peter Funk, home: ✉Oldenburger Str.86, D-27777 Ganderkesee
mobile:+49-179-640-8878 <http://www.artcom-gmbh.de/>
office: ArtCom GmbH, ✉Haferwende 2, D-28357 Bremen, Germany

Having 3 settings sounds fine to me.

As to In-Reply-To, I don't remember exactly why I did this. I think it was 
to indicate which tracker the email came from. That information is already 
present at to the bottom of the email, so it appears that setting In-Reply-
To is not really necessary.

Hi Tom:

In message
<1458580078.01.0.729648572724.issue2550803@psf.upfronthosting.co.za> ,
Tom Ekberg writes:
>Having 3 settings sounds fine to me.
>
>As to In-Reply-To, I don't remember exactly why I did this. I think it was 
>to indicate which tracker the email came from. That information is already 
>present at to the bottom of the email, so it appears that setting In-Reply-
>To is not really necessary.

Also In-Reply-To should be the message id of the message being replied
to so emal client can thread properly. I would suggest not applying
that part of the patch..

I committed a change: 99e289359798 to fix this.

Tom let me know if it looks like it will not work for you.

I used pefu's proposal, added the config option to the tracker section
of the config file since that is where the email address for the tracker
is set.

Closing.