Date: Sat, 13 May 1995 18:12:33 +0900 From: Stephen Turnbull To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu Subject: Header re-writing From: RDC On Tue, 9 May 1995, Philip Taylor wrote: > each message claims to come from the originator rather than from the list. > Would it be acceptable to the majority of readers of/contributors to Yes ! I was hoping *not* to have to say anything in public, but obviously somebody needs to. It is *not* legal to rewrite the headers in the fashion suggested. According to RFC822, the Reply-To: header is for the use of the *sender*, to redirect replies in case she is using a different account, is moving, is having mail problems, or any of a thousand other possibilities. If the Reply-To header is munged in the fashion you want, it is impossible for the sender to receive automatically-generated replies except via the list, because the From header is ignored by unbroken software in that case. Of course you can start a new thread by mailing directly, but it won't have the In-reply-to header which is useful for threaded mail-reading. Or you can edit the list's address to the original poster's address, but this is making the right thing to do (Gospel according to Hull-Richter) hard to do, the wrong thing to do easy. Yuck. I have no sympathy for people who produce gems such as this: Subject: Re: Header re-writing To: Philip Taylor Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu, CHAA006 AT alpha1 DOT rhbnc DOT ac DOT uk I guess poor Philip wanted 3 copies (list plus two personal) in the opinion of the sender of that message? Maybe he deserves it for starting the thread ;-) Learn to use the software you have, don't suggest breaking the mechanisms that have been worked out to make it possible for unbroken software to do exactly what you want efficiently with minimal typing input. -- Stephen Turnbull / Yaseppochi-gumi / http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/ anon FTP: turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp Check out Kansai-WWW, too ------------> http://pclsp2.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/