🚀 go-pugleaf

Kyle Jones writes
 > If you're going to give someone a message, why not give them
 > _all_ of it, and let _them_ decide which headers they want and
 > don't want?

Jamie Zawinski writes:
 > Personally, I find it extremely annoying when someone forwards
 > a message to me with fifteen lines of "Received:" headers in
 > it.  This was especially true in the Bad Old Days (ending last
 > month) when if I wanted to read mail from home, I had to do it
 > at 1200 baud.  A page full of mail delivery rubbish was
 > exactly what I didn't need.

I agree with you, to a certain point.  I log in from home at 9600
baud and I still think the screen update is too slow.  But I
don't think this annoyance is worth throwing away information.
While I've written thousands of lines of code at 1200 baud, I
can't find much sympathy for you in this day and age using such a
modem.  2400 baud modems are selling for as little as $80 US
these days.

 > I know many people who feel the same way.  Often I know for a
 > fact that the person to whom I am forwarding a message does
 > not care about that garbage.

Well, maybe not right away, but you can never tell if the
information in the "uninteresting" headers might be useful later.

 > With VM, you can explode the message as a digest and the
 > headers get hidden from you, but 1: most people don't use mail
 > readers as sophisticated as VM,

That's too bad, but I'm not going to wait for them to catch up.
I get messages containing useful headers that VM doesn't know how
to deal with (Content-Type, Encoding, X-Snefru-Checksum, ...),
but I don't fault the sender for putting them in.  We're not
talking about gross incompatibility, after all.  And we're not
talking about standards that were published yesterday.  I want to
encourage people to move forward, to do things right, not
continue in the status quo.

 > and 2: most of the time when someone forwards me a message, I delete it
 > immediately after reading it.  So re-discovering the keystroke for digest
 > explosion and then deleting two messages seems silly, so I end up paging
 > through lots of headers I don't care about.

You can set vm-delete-after-bursting and VM will delete the
digest for you.  Hit the `*' immediately after seeing "start of
forwarded message" you don't have to see many of those headers.
The point of carefully encapsulating a message is so this kind of
thing is possible!  Stripping the headers is the easy solution,
but it isn't the right one.

 > > Suppose the mail delivery agent on your host autocratically
 > > decided that you didn't need or want certain headers and
 > > stripped them before delivering mail to your mailbox.
 > 
 > It's not the same thing because those headers are there for
 > debugging problems in mail delivery.  Of what possible use are
 > those headers when I am forwarding a message to someone else?

If they want to reply to the message, those Received headers can
be invaluable in finding a path back to the sender that works.
I've resent bounced mail this way many, many times with success.