[Mailman-Users] From field displayed by MS Outlook

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:26 PM -0500 2004/01/22, Barry Warsaw wrote:

>  Who's the agent responsible for the actual transmission of the message?
>  Is Mailman acting as this agent?  Arguably not.

	I disagree.  I believe that this is exactly the role that Mailman 
is fulfilling.

>  One other thing.  Mailman also adds an Errors-To header with the same
>  envelope sender address.  Errors-To isn't described in RFC 2822, and
>  it's described as non-standard, discouraged in RFC 2076.  This latter
>  recommends Return-Path instead, so even there maybe Mailman isn't doing
>  quite the right thing.  (It's not clear to me whether Outlook is
>  conflating From and Return-Path also, though.)

	However, you're not taking into account the fact that the MTAs 
almost always ensure that there is a correct "Return-Path:" header, 
and will in fact wipe out any "Return-Path:" header that might have 
previously existed.

	However, this won't happen with the "Errors-To:" header, which is 
largely used by older and obsolete MTAs which don't know about 
"Return-Path:".


	In this case, I disagree with the RFCs, at least so far as this 
issue pertains to Mailman -- these rules are meant for MTAs and not 
MLMs.

	It is highly unlikely to cause any harm for Mailman to use 
"Errors-To:", and is likely to help when the messages are processed 
by older and obsolete MTAs.  Moreover, it is useful to the rest of 
us, because more modern MTAs will ignore it and yet it will still 
provide potentially useful information.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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