[Mailman-Developers] Sender field

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "James" == James Ralston <qralston+ml.mailman-developers at 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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