ietf-mxcomp
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: TECH-ERROR (-core): misuse of Resent- fields

2004-09-07 12:47:55

Harry Katz wrote:
On Tuesday, September 07, 2004 10:47 AM, Tony Finch
[mailto:fanf2(_at_)hermes(_dot_)cam(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk] wrote:


It is unfortunate that most of the terminology in this area is ambiguous, and this is not helped by willful misinterpretation of a document that is trying to be clear about which meaning is intended.


I agree the terminology is ambiguous.  I disagree that we're engaging in
"willful misinterpretation".  A somewhat broader interpretation perhaps,
but one which both is reasonable and useful under the circumstances.

Harry,

I would suggest that marid-core adds a note pointing to the approriate section in RFC 2822 stating that the draft is modifying the behavior suggested in the RFC and that RFC 2822 is being ambigious.

BTW, Pete Resnick is lurking here so we can ask him straight out. In particular the following message suggests that Harry may be right (http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com/200406/0952.html):

"It says that the Resent- headers are for MUA resending, not for MUA encapsulated-message forwarding and not for /etc/aliases or .forward
forwarding. Read the paragraph starting "Note:" in section 3.6.6 of RFC
2822.

In one of the IETF jabber sessions, I raised this very point. See the
the 15:58:43 entry of:
http://www.xmpp.org/ietf-logs/marid(_at_)ietf(_dot_)xmpp(_dot_)org/2004-04-19.html
(I've included a copy of this part of the log at the end of this post)

After the jabber session I asked Pete Resnick, the editor of RFC2822
to clarify the issue. He said that when RFC2822 was written, the
language about forwarders was intended to be about .forward files.
Further, he said, now that the spam discussion has been raised, some
consider forwarding services, such as pobox.com, to be gateways rather
than forwarders. That is, the email is coming out of the transport
system and being re-introduced, just like a mailing list.
"

See that entire message.

Yakov