Reply to the other guy when I'm the last sender

[T C]

Suppose someone has sent me a message – let's call it Message 1. I want to reply, so I hit Reply and my message – let's call it Message 2 – goes to the sender of Message 1. Good.

Now suppose I send a follow-up message – let's call it Message 3. I go to Message 2 and hit reply. This time, I want Message 3 to go to the recipient of Message 2. I don't want it to go to the sender of Message 2, because that's me, and I'd just be sending a message to myself.

I'm 99.9% sure that's how Thunderbird has worked for the many years I have been using it. Recently, though, it has stopped working that way. When I hit Reply to a message I've sent to someone else, Thunderbird composes a message from me to me. This is very frustrating because the problem can go unnoticed until much later. Most often, I catch the problem early when I review my inbox, but a couple of times I've failed to deliver info to someone because I've failed to notice that I sent it to myself.

Can someone please confirm that Thunderbird is supposed to reply to the recipient when I'm the sender of the message being replied to? And if that is the expected behavior, does anyone have any advice on what might have broken it?

I'm using Thunderbird 52.7.0.

-TC

[DanRaisch]

Just tested here with Thunderbird 60.8.0 and the address in the "To" field when replying to a Sent message (your Message 1) is the sender of Message 1.

Does the same thing occur if you launch the application in Mozilla Safe Mode? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode

[sfhowes]

On my setup, replying to Message 2, which is in the Sent folder, goes to the recipient of Message 2. But most users would send a follow-up by right-clicking Message 2, Edit As New Message.

[T C]

DanRaisch and sfhowes, thank you for doing those tests and confirming the expected behavior.

To recap, Thunderbird does not behave that way for me some of the time. Specifically, when I reply to a message in my Sent folder, Thunderbird will sometimes compose a message from me to me.

I did some experiments and learned that the odd behavior occurs for only one of my email accounts. I can think of only one way that email account is different from the others -- I have it configured to store Sent messages on my local computer rather than the server. I don't have time to explore further now, but perhaps that unconventional configuration is confusing Thunderbird somehow.

-TC

[DanRaisch]

That's not really an unconventional configuration, unless the folder in which those sent messages are stored is not the usual Sent folder on the local computer.

[T C]

I checked, and I have been using the usual Sent folder on the local computer.

I've done some more testing, and there seems to be a direct correlation here. If I reply to any message in the local Sent folder, the new message is addressed from me to me. If I reply to any message in a server Sent folder, the new message is properly addressed to the previous message's recipient.

I have switched back to using the server's Sent folder. That workaround is good enough for me.

-TC