So you're saying a boss, who delegated a menial task like sending mail
to 1,000 employees, actually wants to see the 50 or so vacation notices
from 50 employees? That's an interesting boss.
"wants to see them" is something else. I am only arguing that the
secretary has no reason to see them as part of the delegated task.
If the pointy-haired-boss (PHB) delegated transmission of the message,
I don't understand why the PHB wouldn't also delegate calling folks
at home (while they're on vacation) to ensure they have received the
important email message -- just like the PHB has delegated non-
delivery notices to the secretary by virtue of having the secretary
use Sender/From.
As for the vacation notices being essentially delivery acknowledgements,
I'll point to MDN (RFC2298) which correlation MDN behavior between
the Envelope-from address and the disposition-notification-to address
-- the correlation isn't between the header From address and the
disposition-notification-to address.
I know, I said I would have argued against that as well. MDNs are also
applications of the network and not management messages.
In my world view, DSNs are equivalent to ICMP messages, in that provide a
way for the network to inform the nodes that something will not succeed so
stop trying (or in the case of delays, that something is taking longer
than expected). From this perspective, passing around application-layer
acks and responses (such as MDNs and out-of-office notifications) between
the network nodes instead of between the application end-points is a
fundamental layering violation. There is no reason to tell the network
nodes about an application issue, and its almost always the wrong choice.
I still don't see the case where sending a vacation notice to the
envelope-from causes a problem. I do see cases where sending a vacation
notice to From: causes a problem -- such as in the very case we're
arguing, where a secretary sends a message to 1000 employees and the
boss doesn't care who is on vacation nor does the boss care who has
an invalid email address nor does the boss care who has a down
mailer and hasn't received the message in 5 hours.
-d