I reckon that it's more likely a verb that's going to be dropped in
Mail 3.0.
I filed a bug, it's numbered 4904656.
I sure hope this verb isn't dropped in the next Mail. As I pointed
out in my original posting, parsing a from address and consing up a
valid to address is nontrivial. This is because (in Mail.app's
wisdom) the sender is a flat string (including the Name and the
<email address>, with _many_ valid forms), but the recipient is a
structure with the name and address in separate fields.
Mail.app knows all the rules for turning one into another. As
someone who wrote / hacked perl code to do this job long ago, I
really don't want to reproduce that magic in AppleScript. The "reply"
verb leverages Mail.app's logic for doing this, but is useless for
scripts as is.
Another way to fix the issue is to have recipient objects in outgoing
messages be flat strings, and let Mail.app parse them, or to have
senders be pre-parsed objects, like recipients are.
Again, thanks for all the thoughtful comments. (And I'm still
puzzled why it _works_ for deivy!)
