[Alpine-info] reply from "To:" Address iff recognized

[jason-alpine-info at shalott.net]

> I note that it isn't working for me for messages from mailing lists, but 

> I will need to see whether it is related to how I use fetchmail as part 

> of my incoming mail flow.


It's not because of your fetchmail, this is expected (unfortunately).

In the case of a mailing list, the "To" field has the mailing list's email 
address, not your email address.  It's delivered to you, but none of the 
To/From headers mentions you ("From" is the sender, and "To" is the list 
address).  So it's expected that this feature wouldn't catch it -- unless 
you add the list address to your Alpine Setup->Config as one of your 
Alternate Addresses.  But note that this would have some other effects, 
which you may or may not want; so it may not be your best option.

The other option you can use is Roles.  You can create a role in 
Setup->Rules->Roles, which gets invoked if certain conditions are met. 
To set the From as the address you have subscribed to a list, you could 
create a new rule, set the sole condition as Participant == list-address 
(this covers the case where the list address is in the To or the Cc), set 
the action as change the From header to your address that's subscribed, 
and then (optionally) tell it to use the role without confirmation for 
replies and forwards.

The advantage of the latter approach is that it gives you much more power 
and fine-grained control -- you can use lots of different conditions to 
invoke the role, and take lots of different actions in response.  The 
disadvantage is that you have to create each rule explicitly, in advance. 
For email lists, that you subscribe to one-at-a-time, this is probably a 
reasonable trade-off.

The advantages of the former approach are that it is simpler; you can use 
wildcards/catch-alls, so a single rule can match many addresses; and most 
of all, it conveys the actual semantics of the situation to Alpine -- 
i.e., if I own jason.com, and I have routed all inbound mail for 
@jason.com into my inbox, then I can use these config settings to 
basically let pine "understand" that ${ANYTHING}@jason.com _IS_ me, and 
then stuff like replies, index behaviour, etc, all work the way that you 
would naively expect and want.


  -Jason