Re: Mandatory From field, anonymity, and hacks

Keith Moore wrote:
> 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.
No, MUAs often send raw message text to an executable transport agent
(e.g. sendmail) which examines the message header to determine recipients.
To send this message, I did not have to inform my MUA or any transport
software of envelope addresses; they were determined from the header
To and Cc fields.


> > As noted above, the most important thing is that the sender envelope
> > address be usable.
>
> in a news-to-mail gateway?
No, for general gateways -- Usenet news has no equivalent of a sender
envelope address, as noted.

> > Usenet news is an application of the RFC [2]822 Internet Message Format.
>
> no more than SMTP is an application of the FTP protocol.
SMTP replaced FTP mail-specific commands(and the short-lived MTP) for
transport of messages. The mail-specific FTP commands, MTP, and SMTP
transport(ed) Internet Message Format content (RFCs 561, 680, 724, 733,
822, 2822).  As do POP (several versions), IMAP, NNTP, LMTP, and RFC 2476
submission protocol.  It's certainly true that NNTP is a different protocol
from SMTP, and both differ from POP (although there are similarities in
those three, e.g. byte-stuffing), and all three of those differ from IMAP.
Nevertheless, they all transport Internet Message Format content.