On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Keith Moore wrote:
Lists that set Sender are broken anyway, because (as you point out)
this obscures who originally sent the message. Of course, there are
exceptions - such as digests and anonymous lists - but they're rare.
I agree with you, but this is not what current practice is and practicly
all mail lists do add Sender header (including this ietf-822 list). And I
think this may even have been documented, I seem to remember reference
in some RFC that Sender header should be added by mail lists.
In general, if software thinks it needs to rename a field that's
already there, there's usually something fundamentally wrong with the
_intent_ of that software. The primary purpose of submission agents,
MTAs, lists, and recipient MUAs is to _preserve_ the original message,
not to alter it.
Well, the primary purpose of any MTS is to delivery email or rather in
current world (with spam all around) it is to delivery email that recipient
would like to see. Header data are part of toolset used by MUAs and MTAs
as means of identifying properties of that messages and how it its been
(or being) delivered. Addition of information to identify that message
passed through email list and identification of mail list email address
seems quite appropriate and such data is usefull for the user.
What is not ok is loss of data, such as original Sender or in fact data
about previous mail lists if message passed through more then one and
then List-* headers are all overridden.
Now as has been mentioned, I plan to document these Original- headers
in the
Internet draft so if you like to provide some feedback about it,
please go
ahead
Naturally, I'd like to see the draft before I comment on it.
I'm working on half a dozen documents and among then I'm afraid this draft
is not high priority (and its not going to be anything super new anyway),
but I'll try to finish within next 3 months...
But in the mean time, you're welcome to comment on the following:
http://www.elan.net/~william/emailsecurity/draft-leibzon-emailredirection-traceheaders-00.txt
Note - it was published as internet draft, but IETF version has several
formatting errors with new lines, actually even above on my page still has
few of these and this first version has number of other text problems too,
so I'd like to see comments on the concept in general for now.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net