🚀 go-pugleaf

> Excerpts from netnews.comp.mail.misc: 29-Jun-90 Re: user's aliases on
> the T.. Richard Doty@puffin.USS. (1887)

> >.  Thus,
> >the example should be:
> >
> >	To: foo: user1@dom.one, user2@some.dom, user3@dom.xxx ;

> I agree with the commas, but the individual destinations are
> mailboxes, so I would think they could be local addresses, too.

Sure, they could be local, but don't you always append the local domain
to each addressee?  You certainly have to when you send such mail off
your site.

> Excerpts from netnews.comp.mail.misc: 29-Jun-90 Re: user's aliases on
> the T.. Richard Doty@puffin.USS. (1887)

> According to RFC1123,
> 	 When a message is delivered or forwarded to each address of an
> 	 expanded list form, the return address in the envelope ("MAIL
> 	 FROM:") MUST be changed to be the address of a person who
> 	 administers the list, but the message header MUST be left
> 	 unchanged; in particular, the "From" field of the message is
> 	 unaffected.

Ah, but you're mixing apples and lightbulbs here.  The address-list
syntax that includes a group name (as in ``name: <list>;'') has nothing
particularly to do with an ``expanded list form'' as described in RFC
1123.  The former is a way of syntactically grouping a list of addresses
in a message header, and has limited utility to some user agents in
allowing aggregation of sets of addressees.  The latter refers to a real
live mail redistribution mechanism, for example something that turns
mail to header-people@mc.lcs.mit.edu to a message directed at lots of
speciflc mailboxes (more specifically, mail to
info-andrew@andrew.cmu.edu into a message addressed to about 200 people).

About the only direct connection between these two forms is that some
implementors of redistributing mechanisms have considered rewriting
message headers of mail addressed to the list to be in the empty-group
format (``name:;'').  Of course, most mail redistributing mechanisms
have learned to keep their mitts off the actual header.

But where this discussion started was not with mail redistribution
mechanisms, but rather with mass mailings directed by a user agent (e.g.
Mush).  If a real mail redistribution mechanism were involved, there
would be no question about what to put in the To: and CC: fields of such
mail: those fields would simply bear the address of the mail
redistributor (e.g. ``info-andrew@andrew.cmu.edu'').  The issue at hand
is what To: and CC: should contain if the wide distribution comes from a
user agent expanding a personal alias that lists a lot of names. 
Apparently, Mush, under some $no_expand flag, leaves only the name of
the user's alias in the header, in spite of the fact that such an
address is unreplyable--mail to that address, e.g. from off-site, won't
be redistributed.  One of the many alternatives to such a scheme for
what-to-put-in-the-To:-field is to use one of these empty groups, so
that recipients will at least know that the exact membership of the To:
field is hidden to them, and that they can't send messages directly to
``the set of folks that got this one.''

Does this help?  It doesn't make sense to compare syntactically-named
address groups (name: addr, addr, addr, addr ;) with mail redistribution
agents.  They're not meant to be the same thing.

		Craig