Reply-all deletes recipients if they are aliases on same account
 

FYI I posted this in the "help" forum but not sure that's where it belongs, so moving it here. (Perhaps an admin can remove it from Help if they are able?):

Hi all,

I've been an 'enhanced' FastMail user for more than 10 years now. I love it, recommend it a lot, and have found it super-flexible and useful. We use Sieve and folders extensively, tons of aliases and personalities. My setup is a little unusual, as my partner and I share a few accounts, and manage a lot of our email using folders, personalities and aliases. It's been very very useful to work this way, as we can send email 'from' one another, and manage one another's email seamlessly.

However there's one major issue that messes us up a lot. If we receive an email that is to both of us (either in the TO: line or the CC: line) as well as other people, and either of us does a "Reply-all", it REMOVES the other person's address from the new TO: line.

I'll explain with an example. My name is Matt. My partner's name is Susan. If I receive an email that's been addressed to both matt@ourdomain.com and susan@ourdomain.com, we each get a copy in our respective folders. Either one of us can reply, and the reply comes from the right peronality. BUT, if I do a reply-all, the resulting message is addressed to everyone on the original email EXCEPT susan (and vice-versa).

I know this is a corner-case, because not many people share accounts like this, but I do think it's a bug -- it's meant to strip off your own address when you reply-all, and the algorithm for doing that is overzealously stripping off all of our FM-related addresses.... is there any way to fix this?

Thanks.
<M>

Sorry to take nearly a week to respond to your post. After thinking about this for a while, I don't think that there is any obvious manner for Fastmail to improve how this works without requiring additional problems for other users. The problem is that Fastmail allows you to use many sending personalities and receiving aliases, and you don't want to get extra copies sent to yourself.

After some testing, I agree that the webmail Compose screen seems to strip away any address associated with your account, with some odd exceptions I don't understand. Ideally you want the only address removed to be the ones which match the From address. But this can get complex if subdomain or plus addressing is used.

So I will send an email to Fastmail staff and see if they can look into the logic used in creating a reply-to-all message. Are you using the classic or normal (new AJAX) user interface?

Bill

Thanks so much for your reply.

I use the new interface, also the Beta sometimes (we use it to view and respond to calendar invites, for example... but not search.... oh no, not search. :) )

It would be great if there was a workaround here. I imagine something simple like "if I'm about to strip an address that is different (at the user level) from the one that is sending, leave it in there."

Thanks.
<M>

Sorry for the additional delay! Fastmail finally got back to me about this complex issue:
So that's the best we can expect for now. After thinking hard about this and trying various tests, I don't think a single solution will work in all use cases unless Fastmail adds additional configuration controls. What you need in your situation will cause trouble for others, unfortunately.

Bill

Thanks for getting back to me.

It is nice to at least understand that this is now a recognized problem....

Would love to see it fixed though, especially now that they know how.

M

Hi folks.

This continues to be our #1 issue with FastMail.... is it fixable in any way? About a year ago, Rob said:

"Though the actual code itself is stupidly complex for what it's doing.
Anyway, I guess I should add this to the "should be cleaned up" one day pile. *sigh*"

It just caused us a big SNAFU with a client and a very long multi-threaded email exchange that didn't reach an important recipient... Can I do anything to encourage someone to spend a few hours looking at it?

We love FastMail and have been using it for a decade....

<M>

... even if it were just to pop up a warning about what's been stripped -- this could help us catch it before it cuts us out of the loop. And this could be an 'advanced' toggle that we set somewhere deep in settings, so other people don't get affected?

One idea I have (which may or may not work out well) is to add BCCs to the personalities. This assumes that you are willing to get a copy of the replies even when you did not receive the original emails.

From experience, I shall be surprised to see any changes in this area for an issue that has limited or no impact on most users. The problem is that changes can have side effects that are quite unpredictable. If this was my code, I doubt I would be keen to mess with it.

Hi all.

Love the JMAP functionality and speed - now using the FM web app on my iphone all the time even. So fast and great interface.

This issue (stripping cc's out of a reply-all message) that I brought up a couple years ago persists, and keeps biting us... any thoughts at all towards fixing it? A few years back Rob was going to 'add it to the pile'....

Still LOVE fastmail, just wish this wrinkle was gone.

<M>

Did you ever try BritTim's BCC solution? It was my thought, too, as I read your posts. Set the personality you're using to always BCC Susan.

Edit:
Or even better: How about a distribution list that maps to both your addresses, with a personality (that auto-BCCs Susan) to go along with it? Then she gets a copy of everything.

Yeah, this doesn't really work because she doesn't want a copy of every single email I write -- only the ones that she was initially cc'd on, and that I then reply-all to.

I'm going to see if there's a sieve solution - maybe I can insert an "X-ccd-susan" header into incoming mail that I then check for when I reply... or something.

It is frustrating that it just strips the cc'd name if it is part of any personality.

You can't modify the headers in Fastmail Sieve. I just sent a reminder to the Robs (Rob M and Rob N) at Fastmail about this issue.

Bill

As Bill says, you cannot modify the headers within sieve.

Have you considered having two personalities for each of Matt and Susan, one with a BCC (used when you want the other to see the replies) and one without. This is not ideal, but may be workable.

Another (truly ugly) option that might do what you want does use sieve. On receipt, you could do a body test on susan@yourdomain.com. If matched, do a redirect copy to susan. This may be effective because replies tend to have the original email, with its recipients, in the body of the message. I do not think this will lead to duplicate messages as the message number will still be the same on the redirect. Let me know if you need details on how to implement this.

Fix on beta
 

Fastmail just told me they have a proposed fix for this issue on beta, and so far my tests show that the problem has been fixed. Please log into http://beta.fastmail.com and see if replies now properly go to your aliases.

Bill

WOW! This is fantastic....

I had somehow missed your post from April 18th, but woke up today to this working......

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.... it is close to lifechanging for us.

Yay Fastmail!
<M>