Re: Replying to Sender or (gasp) Return-path

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2 total messages Started by Mark Crispin Tue, 18 Nov 1986 17:32

#268

Author: Mark Crispin
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1986 17:32

24 lines
1668 bytes

Marshall -

     The Internet mail world is not yet such that it is impossible
to use a mail system that obeys RFC 822 when it comes to the
semantics of replying.  The only reason for adding Return-Path to
your mail user agent's REPLY parser is laziness on the part of the
mail maintainer -- that is, he is unwilling to handle the problems
which occasionally come up and explain the realities of mail to a
user who thinks that the reply address is "always" available in a
Return-Path.

     Various vendors then "validate" their mail software against
this lazy software, since it's located on a Unix and everybody is
running Unix so it must be right...  Then the poor maintainers of
non-Unix software get long, pendantic complaint letters from the
above-mentioned vendors (or their users) stating everything imaginable
about the Internet protocols except the facts.  Wollongong is a
worst case, but not the only case.

     I don't want to argue English semantics, but "be conservative
in what you send" sure means to me that you should be conservative
and not send replies to the Return-Path.  What's more, replying to
the Return-Path is explicitly forbidden by RFC 822.
-------

Re: Replying to Sender or (gasp) Return-path

#275

Author: Robert Elz
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1986 20:46

42 lines
2607 bytes

This discussion is getting absurdly out of hand.  No-one has
suggested using the "Return-Path" for replies anytime that
there's a From or Reply-To field in the header.

It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me to allow replies
to the Return-Path (or Sender) if there's no From in the message
(which clearly indicates that the sending mailer is broken).

But as reported, rfc822 forbids this.  In that case, I think
I'd just "fix" my mailer - if an incoming message arrives with
no From: field, then copy the Return-Path to a From header...

Same effect, and this isn't forbidden.  The right solution is
to fix the broken mailer - but that's someone else's broken
mailer, and getting others to fix their broken programmes isn't
always easy.

But, the rfc822 comments on where replies should be sent cannot
possibly be mandatory - its entirely irrational to try to forbid
to whom anyone sends mail (at least just on the basis of what's
in a header, ignoring political/financial problems).  A reply
is just a mail item, I can send it to anyone I like.  All that's
material here is for the headers to give some guidance on where
replies are intended to go, and for mailers to use this guidance
to establish the default recipients.

Normally, if someone sends me mail with both From & Sender headers
(indicating in the typical case that a secretary sent mail on
behalf of someone else) I would send a reply to the From header.
This would be a reply on some matter of substance in the mail.
On the other hand, if I don't like the way the mail is typed
(say I find some spelling error that offends me, or the layout
makes the mail hard to read on my terminal - wider than 80 cols)
then I think sending a "reply" to the Sender is entirely reasonable.

Yes, that's not a "reply" in some narrow sense of the word.
I intrepret the word more liberally though - any message
I send that is a response, of any kind, to mail I receive is
a reply (ie: if receiving the original mail was the stimulus
necessary to send my mail, then my mail is a reply).

Robert Elz			kre%munnari.oz@seismo.css.gov

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