On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 14:27:16 -0500 Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@impressive.net> wrote:

When I look at the headers of a message, I expect to see them as they were composed by the message author.

You've lead a sheltered mailing list life.

I don't think MLMs should alter the contents of important headers like To:, From:, Cc:, Subject:, Message-Id:, Reply-To:, except in very rare cases.

There's a core debate here, which is as old as mailing lists, and was old when I first ran into it 18 years ago:

Is a message distributed by a mailing list a new message or merely a redistribution of an prior message?

Depending on the answer to that question you can justify (or not) things like Message-ID being rewritten by the list server, as well as To: etc. Its comparatively easy to frame cogent and sound arguments for either side. The worse and most comforting thing is that in practice both sides are correct. Mailman is merely marginally extending this debate to also enclude the To: header -- which you should care to note is not original to Mailman, but has been a fairly dead aspect of the debate for some years (due more to apathy than resolution).

-- J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw@kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.