Grr. Really p!ssed off with this tablet. Touched something inadvertently and all my typing evaporated.

Take 2...

I thought the text you quoted was quite clear. Perhaps I am missing something.

"In Thunderbird 52 a new behavior was introduced for replies to mailing list posts: "When replying to a mailing list, reply will be sent to address in From header...

So setting this new option will restore the previous behaviour, i.e. using the address in the Reply-to header.

I saw much discussion, debate and argument about this between developers and those raising it as a bug, and most of this went over my head. I got the impression it was one of those holy wars, like html vs plain text or top-posting vs bottom-posting. To those people who care about these issues, there is no middle ground, only The One True Way.

I think that for some users, perhaps due to the set-up of the news servers they use, Reply made more sense than Reply-to. And a few vociferous protagonists for a change can easily outweigh the the silent majority who are happy with the way things are. On the face of it, respecting the Reply-to given in the messages would seem to me to be the right thing to do. But again, I don't write to newsgroups very often.

I'm pretty sure the change was made because some users raised a bug. The rest of us failed to notice and so failed to ask for the bug to be dismissed.

I have also seen an argument for making a change in behaviour the default, as otherwise the majority of users will not be aware the change has been made. The switch to "Correspomdents" in the message lists was one such change. All the users who want Thunderbird to be more like Gmail will be happy. The smaller number of old timers who have always done it the old way resent the change, but can reverse it.

Got a bug link Zenos? I have not been successful in locating it.

Zenos, I think the ambiguity in the setting is due to a poor choice of name. "mail.override_list_reply_to" does not (to me, anyway) clearly indicate what "true" represents. Ultimately, the answer is:

• the default behavior was changed
• the default value for the setting is "true"
• get the old behavior with "false".

which I would have known if I went ahead and tested before raising the question. But I was annoyed at the change in default behavior and spent less time than I should have.

I expect you're right that this change was due to a religious argument. Personally, I believe that whenever a behavioral change is introduced and made a default, a means should be provided to retain the old behavior at the same time. I was pissed when the "Correspondents" change was introduced.

I had in mind discussions like these: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77304 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1309486

Perhaps another significant difference is that I will look at my toolbar or context menu and deliberately and carefully select which kind of "Reply" I want to use. Many of these posters are unhappy that their usual ctrl+r keyboard action now does something different.

Thunderbird has a GUI and is quite heavily dependent on mouse actions. If I wanted to use the keyboard as my predominant input method, I think I'd be looking for a different email/newsreader client.

Thunderbird already has some rather dangerous keyboard shortcuts. J and j for junk classification, A for archiving. I like and use keyboard shortcuts when typing, but prefer (by and large) to manage the GUI via mouse.

I had a read of those bugs/discussions/wars, and all I can say is "wow!". There's a whole lot of intransigence in there...over a 17 year period! Thanks for digging those up.

From my perspective, the mailing lists I am on function as forums. Having the replies go to the list by default is the desired behavior, especially when you consider that the replies to the list are collected in archives that can be treated as a knowledge base in the future.

I understand that some people didn't like that behavior, which is fine. What's not fine is changing the behavior without giving an option to retain the old behavior, especially when the old behavior is what is preferred by the RFCs.

Matt said

Got a bug link Zenos? I have not been successful in locating it.

Ok, Finally found it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1392371