Re: Mandatory From field, anonymity, and hacks

On Jul 26, 2004, at 10:40 PM, Bruce Lilly wrote:

> Keith Moore wrote:
>
> > we don't expect native MUAs to go to great lengths to prevent invalid 
> > or
> > unusable addresses from appearing messages. why should we impose this
> > burden on gateways?
> In the case of an MUA, an invalid address will result in a notification
> or bounce
only if it's an envelope recipient address.

> > when gateways have to translate addresses from one format to another 
> > (as
> > they do between X.400 and internet mail), they should make sure that 
> > the
> > resulting addresses are valid syntax.  this is just sanity checking.
> > the reason it's necessary is that there are usually some addresses 
> > that
> > cannot be translated. but that's not the same thing as ensuring that 
> > the
> > address is valid.
> As noted above, the most important thing is that the sender envelope
> address be usable.
in a news-to-mail gateway?  I think not.  the sender of a usenet 
message doesn't want to know whether some random recipient got the 
message.
> > rather than trying to fix internet mail to
> > accommodate a bad idea in Usenet, maybe the Usenet people need to come
> > up with a better idea.
> Usenet news is an application of the RFC [2]822 Internet Message 
> Format.
no more than SMTP is an application of the FTP protocol.  in either case
the two are similar but different protocols, with different syntax and
semantics.  there are both advantages and disadvantages to having
usenet and [2]822 so similar.