[Mailman-Users] Sender field

Neal Groothuis ngroot at imsa.edu
Thu Apr 27 17:40:03 CEST 2006


To reopen an old discussion:

I would like to request that a feature be added in the next version of
Mailman to allow a list administrator to disable rewriting of the
"Sender:" header, or (better) for this behavior to be eliminated from
Mailman altogether.

Rationale:

  - Outlook treats the Sender field as a person sending on behalf of
another.  This seems to me to be a reasonable interpretation of the
Sender field, per RFC 2822 3.6.2.  When a "bounces" address is included
in the sender field, Outlook displays something along the lines of "From
listname-bounces+jim=reader.domain.com at mailman.server.com On behalf of
fred at poster.domain.com".  (See Mailman FAQ entry 2.3).  This is undesirable.

  - Thunderbird also displays the sender field, which presents similar
confusion.

  - Useful information (the original content of the Sender: header) is
lost by doing this.

  - Bounces go to the envelope sender or Return-Path: header, not the
Sender: header, so this is not necessary for proper bounce handling.

  - Again from RFC 2822 3.6.2, the Sender: header should contain the
address of the agent responsible for transmitting the message, meaning
that a person who sends mail to the address in that header should expect
to reach said agent, not suggest to Mailman that a message bounced.

  - Information regarding interacting with the list is provided by the
List-* headers; including it in the Sender: field is unnecessary.


Removing this (IMO) unwanted functionality is trivial:

diff -ru mailman-2.1.5.orig/Mailman/Handlers/SMTPDirect.py 
mailman-2.1.5/Mailman
/Handlers/SMTPDirect.py
--- mailman-2.1.5.orig/Mailman/Handlers/SMTPDirect.py   2004-01-22 
17:02:07.0000
00000 -0600
+++ mailman-2.1.5/Mailman/Handlers/SMTPDirect.py        2006-04-26 
13:48:45.0000
00000 -0500
@@ -348,9 +348,9 @@
      # the Sender header at all.  Brad Knowles points out that MTAs tend to
      # wipe existing Return-Path headers, and old MTAs may still honor
      # Errors-To while new ones will at worst ignore the header.
-    del msg['sender']
+    # del msg['sender']
      del msg['errors-to']
-    msg['Sender'] = envsender
+    # msg['Sender'] = envsender
      msg['Errors-To'] = envsender
      # Get the plain, flattened text of the message, sans unixfrom
      msgtext = msg.as_string()



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