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Re: [Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-moore-mail-nr-fields-00.txt]

2004-08-29 13:33:30

Nothing is broken. Sendmail can be invoked using "sendmail addresses" just as easily it can be invoked using "sendmail -t". When your program that uses sendmail is upgraded to recognize the NoReply fields, continue to use "sendmail -t" for the To/Cc/Bcc recipients, and then use "sendmail addresses" for sending the message to the NoReply recipients.

I hope "sendmail -t" is NEVER upgraded to support NoReply headers. That would cause the worst of all possible worlds. As a "sendmail -t" user, you'd never know if your invocation of "sendmail -t" included those NoReply headers or not. Say your "sendmail -t" doesn't support NoReply and you write you code to invoke "sendmail addresses" to handle NoReply headers. Then some helpful admin upgrades your "sendmail -t" to support them. Suddenly the NoReply recipients will be receiving TWO copies of the messages.

If sendmail WERE to be upgraded to support NoReply headers, then it should be done using a DIFFERENT option. (For the version of sendmail on my system, it looks like -T might be available.)

        Tony Hansen
        tony(_at_)att(_dot_)com

Keith Moore wrote:


Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:

On Aug 27, 2004, at 4:51 AM, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

Philip Hazel writes:

I guess I'm an "other". Not only MUAs, but also other software that wants to send email uses "-t". I suspect there are more applications that do this that I/you/we think.



Right. Personally, I've used it more times than I can remember, in situations ranging from little throwaway scripts up to parts of billing systems. Am I so unusual? It is the easiest way I know to generate a valid message with a custom From field on unix.

It wouldn't surprise me if many thousand automated mail senders use it.



I wouldn't be surprised if I had personally written a thousand shell scripts that use it. It wouldn't surprise me if quite a few of them are still in use at sites I know nothing about. Breaking "sendmail -t" strikes me as about as good an idea as changing the semantics of asterisks in shell scripts. -- Nathaniel


note that it would only break the programs that somehow started using ReplyTo fields before sendmail got upgraded to support ReplyTo fields.