[Tickets #2617] RESOLVED: Filtering on "Sender" does not use "From"

[bugs@bugs.horde.org]

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Ticket URL: http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/?id=2617
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 Ticket             | 2617
 Updated By         | robert at defore.st
 Summary            | Filtering on "Sender" does not use "From"
 Queue              | Ingo
 Version            | HEAD
 State              | Rejected
 Priority           | 1. Low
 Type               | Enhancement
 Owners             | 
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robert at defore.st (2005-10-22 12:16) wrote:

Everything you say is true, but few users of web mail will understand the
difference between Sender and From, and will naturally think (as I did) that
"Sender" meant "the source of the message".  I've been sending and receiving
email since '92 and I've never used the Sender field on purpose.  I didn't
even know it was an official field until I read the response to my bug
report.

The RFC gives the example of a secretary sending on behalf of a manager,
where the From contains the manager and the Sender contains the secretary. 
It's certainly reasonable to think someone would want to filter on this
distinction, but it's not reasonable to expect every Ingo user to understand
the distinction, to remember the correct meaning, or to want to filter this
way frequently.

Worse still, Sender comes first in the drop-down of fields, and Subject
comes between it and From:

    To
    Sender
    Subject
    From

So as a first measure I would propose putting From at the top of the list. 
As a second measure I would propose adding clarifying text after the field
name:

    From     (message author)
    Sender (not message author)
    To
    Subject

Also, since the RFC recommends against specifying a Sender when it is the
same as the From, how about filtering on From when Sender is absent instead
of just failing without a heplful indication of why.

Furthermore, the list of fields is hardly exhaustive (what if I want to
filter on Reply-To?), so how about having a checkbox to enable
infrequently-used fields like Sender and Reply-To, and when the box is
unchecked, just show the "normal" filtering fields, From, To, Subject, Body,
X-Spam*.

I don't think a documentation patch would be any help since I would have no
idea where to look in the documentation for why my mail didn't get filtered
when I specifically told Ingo to move messages around by what I thought was
"who sent me this".

In any case, this IS a bug in the sense that the program didn't do what I
expected.  Just because it's behaving "correctly" doesn't mean it's behaving
"well".  Hiding behind standards in the face of user confusion strikes me as
bordering on what Steven Covey refered to as "Malicious Obedience".