In at least some situations, using a "work" address in messages
sent from "home" or vice versa or similar dichotomies would
likely be looked upon with a jaundiced eye; far worse in some
cases.
Yes, that's true - but I don't think it's up to the mail system
to enforce such rules, any more than I think it's up to the
snail-mail postal service to check whether a residental customer
is sending out mail on company letterhead.
I'm not suggesting that the mail system as such should implement
such forms of enforcement; merely that some configurations do
so.
Understood. I'm suggesting that those configurations should be
declared dysfunctional and encouraged to change. Again, I think we're
not going to fix any of these problems unless we discourage some
existing behavior and recommend some new behavior to replace it. In
this case we could fix this problem in either of two ways:
1) insist that From should be settable by the author, and invent a new
field to do what Sender was supposed to do, but in a better way
2) declare that From has become what Sender is supposed to be, and
invent a new field (maybe call it Authors:) to specify the authors'
addresses
I happen to prefer the first one, as it is both consistent with the
original design and compatible with existing user agents. I'd rather
break a few dysfunctional private mail systems than break everyone's
user agent. If #2 were chosen senders could put the authors' addresses
in Reply-To in addition to the Authors: field (assuming they didn't
want to redirect replies to somewhere else). But this would overload
Reply-To even more than it is already.
The reason we're having these problems is because of overloading
of various fields - reply-to, from, sender, mail from - to the
point that they've become ambiguous. I suspect we're not going to
solve
the problems without discouraging some of the overloading. And that
in turn probably means we'll have to define some new ways of doing
some of the things we used to overload these fields for.
Not merely header fields are overloaded, as discussed on mail-ng,
the message header itself is overloaded.
very true.
To the point that it's
nigh impossible to separate them (see the recent list message
regarding Resent-Message-ID and message/partial for a hint). I
don't think it's possible to provide a clean solution short of
a new design that takes into account the lessons learned in the
past three decades.
And I don't think it's possible for any solution to be successful
unless it considers transition issues. We're not going to get 10**9
email users to change if it involves very much pain, and especially not
if old user agents can't easily exchange mail with new ones, and vice
versa. And I consider having replies work in an unsurprising and
effective manner part of what it means to "exchange mail".
Keith