🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec20.022054@avsht.sph.spb.su> avsht@sph.spb.su wrote:
>Suppose I got a forwarded letter. The original letter
>had the header "Return-Receipt-To", so the target system
>has already generated and sent notifying mail.
>Neverthenless this header came to my system as well.
>Should my mailer send one more notifying message to the
>author?

I believe that it should not do so (I was once bombarded by return receipts
after sending a bug report to one of FSF's bug-reporting addresses, which
expanded to a mailing list).

In the case of a message being manually forwarded, the forwarder should
probably delete the Return-Receipt-To header.

There are also a few ways that the message can be automatically forwarded to
another system:
1)	via an alias expansion
2)	via a sendmail .forward file
3)	by expansion into a mailing list (this is often a special case of
	alias expansion)

In the case of automatic forwarding I'm not sure, however what the best approach is:
a)	if forwarding, don't send a return receipt; defer that to the system
	performing final delivery
b)	send the return receipt, but delete the Return-Receipt-To header
	before forwarding.

>References to standards (RFCs?) will be very useful.

There aren't any--Return-Receipt-To has not been standardized (to my
knowledge), but is hard-coded into sendmail.

[Followups directed to comp.mail.sendmail]
-- 
	Bruce Lilly		blilly!bruce@Broadcast.Sony.COM
					...uunet!sonyusa!sonyd1!blilly!bruce