[Mailman-Users] Yahoo Groups' From munging and X-Original-From

[Mark Rousell]

On 25/05/2014 18:27, Peter Shute wrote:
> I'm not comfortable with an email address in the display name not matching the real address. If I saw that in a non list email, it would look spammy to me.

I agree with you in the case of a non-list email but for a list email it
seems to me to make perfect sense to include the original author's email
address in the comment section and the list's address in the address
section.

> I don't like the idea of users getting used to seeing that sort of thing as normal, and there's the problem that lots of mail clients will only show the first few characters of the long display name. Would this be better:
> From: " [some-mail-list] Mark Rousell markr at signal100.com <some-mail-list at yahoogroups.com>

If a mail client only shows the first few characters then I think
putting the mailing list name first would not be beneficial since users
would not be able to see who wrote the message. The original author's
name really does need to go first in my opinion.

I was alerted to this issue by complaints by the users of a Yahoo Groups
mailing list of which I am a member. They are using Thunderbird which by
default does an address book lookup on the From address. Naturally this
was showing the mailing list name as the message author (for those of
them with the mailing list in their address books) and not the original
author. When the setting ('Show only display name for people in my
address book') was disabled, then they could see the raw contents of the
>From header. Thus the original author's name really does need to appear
first but it would be even better if the mail client recognised the
X-Original-From header.


-- 
Mark Rousell

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