CiviMail "reply to confirm email subscription" feature is undocumented and broken
Overview
When you perform the very basic Civi function of signing up for a public mailing list via /civicrm/mailing/subscribe, the email confirmation mentions that you can "Reply to this email" and inserts what appears to be a VERP'ed reply-to address.
There is no mention of this in the docs anywhere that I can find. The only thing the docs mention in setup is handling bounces and email-to-event. It never mentions that this function exists or needs set-up.
I don't have VERP enabled in my current setup (nor do I have any bounce processing enabled) and it just inserts that non-working reply-to address without warning or fanfare. If I hadn't actually taken the time to read the email instead of just clicking the alternative "Confirm" link, I would never have realized what was happening.
This is either a documentation bug or a semi-broken feature that has become stale. Either way, it's a tripwire for anyone new trying to set up mailing list subscriptions.
I've tried posting a query about this to MatterMost twice but it was ignored both times.
Reproduction steps
- Visit /civicrm/mailing/subscribe on any drupal/civi site with a properly configured mailing list and where the outgoing email template hasn't been amended.
- Sign up for a mailing list
Current behaviour
- You'll get the email that contains the phrase "reply to this email"
- Prepare a reply to the email and you'll see the munged email address -- this will occur even if VERP is disabled in the settings
- The site admin will have no idea this happens unless they've been bitten by it before or have taken the time to trigger the email as a test and have carefully read the text of the email.
Expected behaviour
The site admin should know how to configure this by reading the docs (or at least that it's going to happen so they can fix the outgoing email template). --OR-- the "reply to this message" verbiage and the munged email address should not be used.