ietf-822
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Re: Mailing list addition of resent headers

2001-05-22 11:27:20
At 02:55 AM 5/22/2001, Jacob Palme wrote:
One could summarize that if you want people who get the
forwarded message to respond to you, then use a forward
facility, including the incoming message in the body of
a new message. (For some reason, text inclusion is

I believe Ned responded to the "For some reason" statement.

With respect to the initial part of your summary, I believe you have stated it correctly.

The difference between Forward and Resend is determined by desired Reply behavior. (More formally, it is determined by who you want the recipient to perceive as the author, but thinking in terms of Reply is simple and pragmatic.) Am I communicating to you, but attaching someone else's note, for reference. Or am I merely acting as a connector between that someone else and you?

With respect to mailing lists, I'll partially disagree with Keith. For most mailing lists, the list agent is best thought of as a user, in terms of MTA behavior. My posting to the list terminates at the list agent, as far as the transport service is concerned. As far as the user-level, "human" model, of course the list agent is just an intermediary between the author and all the list members. The members must receive mail that appears to be from the author, not from the list.

The problem is that the reply behavior violates this, seeming instead to be like forwarding: replies should go to the list.

So, one could reasonably argue that mailing list agent software should use Resent-, I believe, except that reply behavior still would not be correct, some of the time.

At any rate it might have helped distinguish mailing lists postings from individual postings. However support for Resent has tended to be marginal.

d/


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Dave Crocker   <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking   <http://www.brandenburg.com>
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