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"James" == James Ralston <qralston+ml.mailman-developers@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
James> The Sender header should be employed by the orignator of
James> the message, and only the originator. Mailman is not the
James> originator of a message sent to a list;
OK up to here.
James> it is merely a relay agent.
That is false. Mailman edits the messages, both adding and removing body content, and compiles the message for digests. It may alter or even remove some original headers. The semantics of "originator" in the context of a mailing list are quite unclear to me, and there is not yet general agreement, as is evident from the long history of wrangling over Reply-To munging, Mail-Followups-To, and the like.
I think the "best" behavior would be to consider that if the body of the message is included unchanged (although header or footer may be added), the originator of the message is the author or the author's personal agent (original Sender). In a digest, Mailman is pretty clearly the Sender (since there must be at most one Sender mailbox).
In cases where HTML and/or MIME bodies are stripped, it's a tossup. Or would be, if we didn't have "Resent-*" headers.
Anybody know if Outlook groks Resent-* headers?
James> Mailman's "processing" behavior is to treat a reply to the
James> Sender as a bounce. This is incorrect behavior, because
James> many mail clients will include address of the Sender header
James> in a "reply-to-all" function, causing Mailman to treat the
James> reply as a bounce.
s/incorrect/impractical/. Those clients are broken. If Mailman sends an RFC 1153 digest, it *must* be the Sender, and the individual messages presumably won't have them. Secretaries who are privy to their bosses' mail are reading it at the bosses address; those who aren't, should not be getting copies of replies to their boss. Etc, etc. Replying to Sender is dumb.
James> I would argue that the best course of action is to excise
James> Sender header rewriting entirely and provide no option to
James> turn it on. (Mailman has way too many options already.)
Only if Mailman is taught to add a full complement of Resent-* headers.
Note that use of Resent-* headers has the serendipitous effect of providing an easily available UUID for naming messages when archiving (the content of the Resent-Message-Id field). If there were a List-Archive-Relative-URL header it could be copied there.
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