Subject: Mailing Lists and Mail User Agents

From: "jim (j.) cobban" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 1995 10:22:00 -0400

I sent the following note about a week ago, and there has been no discussion.
In the mean time I have noted one additional advantage to removing the
Reply-To: line from the headers.  It will avoid all of us receiving those
annoying non-delivery notices.  The notices are being sent back to the
Reply-To: address, and therefore we all receive them.  Indeed, since the
non-delivery notices are sent back to the mailing list, a copy of the notice
is delivered to the failing address, so we then receive a notice that the
notice could not be delivered, and so on ad-infinitum.  If the ReplyTo: line
is removed from the headers, then the non-delivery notice would only go back
to the originator of the message.

The mail user agent which we use here at BNR/Nortel has some difficulties
with the headers which are sent out by the AIW mailing list exploders.  It
does not have the same problem with messages from IETF mailing list
exploders, so I wanted to start a discussion of whether it is desireable, or
even possible, to make the AIW mailing lists work like the IETF ones.

The relevant portion of the SMTP mail header from a message on an IETF
mailing list looks like this:

Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 12:47:32 -0400 (EDT)
Sender:[email-masked]
From: "actual name" <[email-masked]>

The relevant portion of the SMTP mail header from a message on an AIW mailing
list looks like this:

Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 16:12:53 -0400
Errors-To: [email-masked]
Reply-To: [email-masked]
Originator: [email-masked]
Sender: [email-masked]
From: "actual name" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]

The problem is that at Nortel we have adapted to the introduction of E-mail
on the Internet by putting in a gateway which translates between RFC 822 and
our corporate E-mail system (which is proprietary and based on APPC).  We did
not want to make a lot of changes to the user interface so the gateway
algorithmically maps the multiple options on the messages it receives from
the outside world to the smaller number of options that are available at our
user agent.  In particular if an incoming message contains BOTH a From: and a
Reply-To: line then (since our UA only has a From field) the Reply-To:
overrides the From.  A consequence of this is that whenever I receive E-mail
from the AIW mailing lists, the only way that I can tell who the mail is
actually from is by directly interrogating the SMTP header (which is
delivered to me as an attachment).

I feel that the AIW mail exploders have gone a little bit overboard putting
the name of the mailing list into three different lines of the header.

I would therefore propose that the AIW mail exploders be modified to remove
the Reply-To: line.  I appreciate that this makes it a little more work to
actually send a reply to the whole mailing list, since the user must use the
contents of the Sender: line explicitly, but it would permit me to know who a
particular message is from, and to be able to carry on an off-line
discussion with that person.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 1995 16:39:51 +0500

My yes vote.

In fact, this would reduce the number of mails from the people at
Wellfleet who are away or on strike etc...

==============================================================
Hung Bui                            Internet: [email-masked]
Netrix Corporation                    Phone: +1 703 793 1016
13595 Dulles Technology Drive           Fax: +1 703 742 4049
Herndon Va 22071
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